Home Sanctuary

Just Your Basic Epiphany

Oops - I set the wrong time to publish this post. Sorry this is late in posting this morning!

Recently, I was meandering into our upstairs bathroom to put some makeup on.  Just as I was passing through the door, my eyes fell on something I hadn't noticed in a good, long while.

I stopped, backed up and did a double take.

I leaned down to inspect.

The baseboards right there were FILTHY! UGH!

Since I was in the bathroom, I naturally reached under the sink to find my handy cleaners. Tucked inside the bright Dollar Tree bin was a small whisk broom.  I grabbed it and went into action.

Running that cute little whisk broom along the edge of the baseboard was easy.  It was only about a 4 foot stretch of molding, so it just took a second.  But it was so euphoric!

With the baby broom in my hand, I looked around.  Hey!  There's another section!  I fairly floated over to it, repeated the quick motions, and was again thrilled with the instantaneous results.

I realized, in that moment of epiphany, that a clean baseboard is a ticket to household nirvana! It says something about you.

It says: you are the Diva of Clean, the Goddess of Goodness, the Queen of Pristine!

Oh, I like the way that feels.

Today's Small Thing is to dust off the baseboards in one room.  You can pick a small room, if you like.  But simply take a broom, dust mop or cloth and run it along the top of the molding.  With each passing foot, you will start to come alive. And by the time you've circled the room, you'll have to put weights on your ankles to keep you from floating into the sky.

The joy!  The rapture!  The dust-free delight!

Seriously, you will love it.

POINTS: 40 for realizing your dust-free dreams by doing one room

BONUS POINTS: 40 for an additional room

BONUS BONUS POINTS: 40 for doing one more room

120 rapturous points!

song of the day: "Realize," Colbie Caillat

Better

Hey, Girl! Are you still beating yourself up over what you failed at yesterday?

Maybe you:

• lost your patience and yelled at the kids

• should have said "no" to dessert

• generally fell off your diet

• didn't get anything productive done

• shot down your husband's suggestion to fool around

• didn't make that phone call

• lost your kids' papers

• bounced a check

• left a load of wet clothes in the washer

• forgot to pay that bill

• let the scummy bathtub go for yet another day

• spent too much time playing farmville

Sometimes I wake up with a "failure hangover" and spend so much time berating myself for my lack of gumption/intelligence/organization that I forget one tiny little thing.

That today is a new day. I can do better.

So let's put an end to the self-flagulation and pick one thing that we can do better than we did yesterday. Today's Small Thing is to choose ONE THING to do well. That's it.

You could read a story to your child well - without looking at your watch or skipping pages. You could spend an extra 5 minutes organizing the receipts in your purse. You could exercise instead of just think about exercising. You could make your man feel like a million bucks by having the bedroom fun be YOUR idea for once. You could fold the last load of clothes and put it away - because it's better than how you did it yesterday. Oh, the choices are endless - and you only have to pick one activity, whatever you want. Just be deliberate about it.

POINTS: 60 for doing ONE THING well - better than you did yesterday, AND leaving a comment letting us know what you'll be doing. Inspire us!!

Point, Counter Point

I woke up this morning, already in a housekeeping deficit. My kitchen counters are cluttered with the weekend's mess of pots and pans, dishes and cookie-making debris that I was too tired to clean up last night.

Sigh. It's not a good way to start a new week.

Thankfully, Today's Small Thing will remedy this and I'll quickly catch up and be able to think clearly about more important things. Our task today is to clear off - and clean - our kitchen counters.

Gather up all the dishes and get them loaded into the dishwasher or sink and wash them up. Then, clear the miscellaneous papers/receipts/hair clips/tools/doggie treats to their respective places and wipe the counters down.  It's AMAZING how much better life feels when those counters are cleared......it's like getting a whole new lease on life!

POINTS: 50 for clearing off AND wiping down your kitchen countes. Feel the serenity!

Want more serenity? Give yourself 20 more points for each bathroom counter you clear/clean. Monday just got a whole lot better.

Company Girl Coffee 8.13

Week Highlight: My sister, Katherine and her kids came over yesterday and spent the night with us! You'd think we would get to see each other more often, but living 70 miles from each other makes it really complicated, when we each lead such full lives. Weeks and months pass by without us getting a chance (or making the chance) to get together and it's heartbreaking.

Aww, look at the two of us! Company Girls for life.

We've decided we CAN do something once a month. Right? Surely we can meet halfway for lunch or set aside a couple of hours to catch up. That's our goal.

Life is too short - and we can do better than we've been doing about seeing each other.

How about you? What are you trying to do better? Is there something you are specifically trying to improve in your life? (BTW, I'm also trying to organize my receipts better, but that's not nearly as fun to write about.)

Hey, link up for Company Girl Coffee, our weekly feature that gives us a chance to visit each other's blogs and chat away in the comment section! Jump in and participate! You don't need an "agenda" or a fancy post - just invite people over by linking up below. The comment section is a free-for-all, so we can get to know our non-blogging Company Girls better there.

There is NO SMALL THING TODAY, due to excessive partying and talking into the late night hours. See what happens when it's been too long between visits? Things really suffer.

Have a great weekend, sweet friends! ~Rachel Anne

How Do You Pick Up the Floor?

One of the best-loved characters in Childrens' literature is Amelia Bedelia, the housekeeper who takes instructions quite literally.  Who could resist a woman who puts sponges into sponge cake, or pitches a tent by throwing it into the woods?

I thought of Miss Bedelia as I considered today's Small Thing, which is to pick up the floor.

I wonder how SHE would go about it?

 

Picking up the floor, or should I say, "picking up what's ON the floor" is one of the fastest ways to make your home look presentable.  It sounds crazy, but I'll betcha if you just look around at your house, you'd find shoes, purses, backpacks, toys, socks, clothes, half-eaten sandwiches, wet towels, and papers, all just laying there to be stepped on and tripped over.

 

Childrens' rooms tend to be the worst, not only because they have so much stuff, but also because they seem to be born with the inability to see anything below their knees.

 

Sometimes, just scooping up the one or two items (or ten or twenty) left on the floor is enough to make it seem like you had a whole team of housekeepers clean up the place.  It's a miracle!

 

It's best if you can actually put the items back where they belong, but don't let the thought of organizing it all prevent you from zipping through the house on a mission to just pick it up. You might try dragging a laundry basket around so you can dump stuff in it as you go, or you could simply stack the items neatly so they are ready to be organized later.  Don't over-think it, just do it.

POINTS: 40 for picking up the floor in one room

BONUS POINTS: 10 for each additional room, up to 4 more

80 points, max. Thanks, Amelia!!

What's on YOUR floor?

 

Divide and Conquer

Home Organization is a big task that never really ends.

That's the bad news.

It's also the good news.

Because that means that you can just keep on improving and getting better as time goes on.  If you're really at a low point in the organizational hierarchy, don't beat yourself up.  Today is a new day with a new opportunity to do things just a tiny bit better. I'm really glad I'm getting the chance to bring my organizational grades up from an "D" to a "B Minus."

OK, possibly a "C Plus," but let's not split hairs.

Last weekend I was on an organizing rampage.  I just couldn't take those junk drawers for another minute.  I went to WalMart and bought cheap drawer dividers in all sizes (packs of 3 for 1.14), plastic bins, clothes hangers and storage boxes.  I told myself that I would just do a little bit, and kept my sights set on one drawer at a time.

What a difference simply putting dividers into drawers makes!  What seemed like a HUGE, impossible job became amazingly easy, once I had the bins in place.  Pens in this bin, rubber bands in that one, household bits and pieces in another one.  I used ziplock freezer bags to gather up like items, like Sharpie pens, game pieces and receipts.  (Receipts will get dealt with another day...)

It made me realize again how important having the right tools are.  With plenty of hangers on hand, it was easy to hang up my son's school clothes.  With lots of bins and baskets, it's simple to put like things together.  The NEATNESS of it all still gives me a lump in my throat.  By golly, that's worth an "A Minus" at LEAST!

Today's Small Thing is to do some division. If you don't have enough drawer dividers or small bins on hand, put them on your shopping list and chip away at purchasing enough for your home.  I have renewed incentive to have more on hand than what I think I'll need so I can easily pop them in place as needs arise.  Look at your problem spots and make note of container sizes that would help ease your pain.  I sense another WalMart trip in my near future.

If you already have plenty of storage containers, spend just 5 minutes organizing what you've got going on.

POINTS: 40 for dividing and conquering today!

Crusty

I was looking through some of the Small Things we've done in the past and couldn't resist resurrecting this one - probably because I was hungry at the time and this pie looked awfully yummy.

 

I have everything "pie" on my mind lately.  I've been dreaming of flaky pie crusts, warm and tender fillings, lattice toppings and ala mode presentations!  I've even written a guest post over at OrgJunkie today:  Home Keeping is like Making Pie. I hope you'll go check it out.

In the meantime, I think it's the crust that has me salivating.  I've never been very confident in my crust-making abilities and tend to use the store-bought variety whenever possible.  But crusts can really make or break a pie, and that's got me thinking of our Small Thing Theme for today....crust in general.

Let's call this: Crust.  The good, the bad and the ugly.

Good Crust:

Toasted bread

Croutons

Pie Crust

The bottom layer of a 7-Layer Bar

The earth's crust, keeping us from being burnt to a crisp by molten lava

 

Bad Crust:

Dirty socks

Toothpaste around the sink

Milk crust in refrigerator shelf

Dried food on the floor

Noses that need blowing

 

Ugly Crust:

Mineral deposits in coffee makers

Nasty toilets

The rubbery bottom of jello that didn't gel right

Pink eye

Foot callouses

Chunks in the cat litter box

 

Today's Small Thing is to do something, ANYTHING, with crusts. You can choose a "good, bad or ugly" crust activity from the list, or come up with one of your own!  It can be silly, down and dirty, or even edible....just have fun with anything crusty today!  Turn up the volume on the song of the day, "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch" to get you in the mood.

 

POINTS: 40 tender, flaky ones

What crusty activity will you do today??  Please share!

 

Media Circus

When I was in 7th grade we got a brand new school (Kerri, remember this?) and a new librarian, who INSISTED that his title was "Media Specialist."

Psh. Media Shmedia.

What kind of "media" did we even have back then? Books, reel to reel movies, and cassette tapes? Hardly enough to be a specialist in. Dewey Decimal Specialist was more like it.

But maybe that guy saw the future tidalwave of electronic information and entertainment and was ahead of his time by a couple of decades.

These days, media has taken over our lives, especially the electronic kind. TV's, computers, ipods, ipads, PDA's, wii's (ok maybe that's not technically media), phones.....along with all the chargers, remotes, handhelds and cords to keep them working. This on top of the printed materials we still use. Talk about a media circus!

Today's Small Thing is to straighten up the media circus in your house. Return phones to their bases, wrap up loose cords, tuck chargers away, put DVD's into their cases and put cases where they belong. Tame the XBox/Gaming devices. And don't forget the "traditional" media: books, newspapers and magazines. You might want to get the clowns in your house to help you out, even though you'll have to crack the whip a few times to get them to perform.

POINTS: 60 for closing the curtain on the media circus at your house.

Capturing the Essence

As I got into the nitty-gritty of trying to paint a chicken on the wall, I realized I had no idea what chicken eyes look like. Are they all black? What color are the pupils? Are they flat? Are they truly the windows to a chicken's soul? I wanted to properly capture the Essence of Chickenness as a grande finale for the murals.

I called my daughter to see if she knew, and we had a good laugh about chicken eyeballs. I mean, when was the last time YOU discussed chicken eyes? We hung up and I searched "chicken images" on my phone. Image after image, the result was the same.

Oh dear. Chickens have very vacant eyes.

Yeah, they might have a lot on their minds, but you'd never know it by their inscrutable expressions. It's like they're only interested in pecking, even though you suspect there is more going on beneath the surface. Well, maybe not.

I fussed and fussed, and finally settled on this sufficiently vacuous look:

It's too bad cute fuzzy chicks turn out to have such ravaged faces and blank stares when they grow up. Chickens are kinda creepy when you think about it.

And I never would have thought about it, had I not made a pointed decision to look intently into chicken expressions to find their very Essence. And it made me think about all the other things I pass by daily without ever really noticing and appreciating.

The flecks of gold in my daughter Meghan's red hair.

The way my daughter Lauren's smile lights up a room.

My son's deep dimples, creases really, that are so charming.

The way the coffee pot gurgles when it is almost through perking a pot.

Sunlight filtered through sheer curtains in my lavender-gray bedroom.

My favorite spot on the couch for reading magazines.

Today's Small Thing is easy. It is simply to NOTICE the good things around you and appreciate them. Your bank account might be dangerously low today, but what bearing does that have on the sweetness of your child's kisses, or your ability to play a board game, or the taste of cold iced tea?? We can get so caught up in the pressures of life that we forget to stare intently into the goodness that is all around us...and we miss it. As you go through your day, look at things as though you were going to paint them - noticing the colors, and textures, and light and softness - and enjoy the richness that no amount of money can buy.

It's found in a grateful heart, and a willingness to see the essence of beauty all around you.

POINTS: 50 for noticing, thinking about, imagining, and intently picturing at least 5 good things in your life. How would you describe them? If you had to paint them, what colors would you use? BTW, squinting your eyes really does help you focus. I'm actually doing it right now....

Company Girl Coffee 8.6

I finished the horse-themed murals - finally! (with the teeny exceptions of the faux French memo board for displaying ribbons, the growth chart, additional greenery and the rope emblazoned table, which will be done today. whew.)

The Jack Russell Terrier is done......boy I hated painting his eyes. I wanted to glue some googley eyes on and walk away, it was so hard.

The distant pasture and horses help balance the jumping horse. Looking at the photo, I see where I need to go back and fix the furthest colt's feet. It looks like he's wearing high top tennis shoes. How did THAT happen??

The growth chart just needs some feet and inches marked on it and it's done. The pink flowers are really just blobs of red, pink and white paint, all smooshed together...but I love how they soften the "plank" of wood.

I'll skip photos of the memo board, since it needs quite a bit of work, and move on to the hen and chicks. I had used a simple line sketch for my pattern, which had no details on it at all. I was really kicking myself for not having better reference material on hand when I started painting the details. Chicken enthusiasts, forgive my hack job - I know it's all wrong.......but fortunately, no one really cares.

Thanks for journeying along with me through this mural process. It was painfully slow, but as of today....IT'S OVER!!!!

Time for some coffee, my friends. Link up below for a fun round of visiting, and being visited by, some of the nicest people on the planet. Simply put your blog post URL into the Linky Tool and enjoy the company. Non-blogging Company Girls, feel free to chat in the comment section - because we appreciate your presence, comments and participation too!