26 October 2010

Coming Home

Speaking of survival mode, another of the things that fell off my radar last week was blogging.  It just didn't happen.  But now that I've survived the week and we had a nice relaxing vacation in France, I'm ready to roll.

Isn't coming home nice?  We had a fantastic time in France, but it was just nice to walk into my own house, and it will be great to sleep in my own bed at night.

One of the things that made it nice was that it was CLEAN.  And picked up.  And there are fresh towels in the bathroom, and fresh sheets on the bed waiting for me to climb into them.

I belong to the school of thought that the extra time and stress are worth it to have a nice clean house to come home to.  It's hard enough to be motivated to walk in and take care of the suitcase of dirty laundry, but to have that plus dishes in the sink and stuff all over floor is just downright overwhelming.  And when it gets overwhelming, doesn't it just make you want to give up?

Despite this, there are times when there is no time to clean everything before we leave.  In that case, I deploy the priority rules.  I use priority rules a lot, from vacation cleaning to company is coming cleaning to family is visiting for a week cleaning.  It works like this:

1.  Pick up the floor
2.  Make the beds
3.  Do the dishes (at least leave the dishwasher running so they're clean when we get home)
4.  Clean the toilets
5.  Clean the rest of the bathroom
6.  Change towels
7.  Change sheets (preferably before completing #2)
8.  Sweep floor
9.  Mop
10. Kitchen stocked (depending on length of trip, this may or may not include perishables)

This is my vacation priority rule list, and basically the numbers just change for other things like visitors, company, etc.  Sometimes a special job needs to be inserted, but you get the idea.  For this last vacation, I only made it through #7, but that's pretty good considering the week I had before we left.

It was so nice to walk through the door feeling stress-free, chaos-free, and peace-ful.  It reminded me why I love coming home.

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