Sarah K Tyler

I dislike clutter. I get stressed out if my workspace, or home is cluttered. I have this theory that clutter leads over spending. At least in my case it does. If I can’t see the back of the pantry, I don’t know what I have. I’m equally as likely to forget about the soup until it expires, or buy more of the salsa for which I already have three jars. (Like last week, sheesh Sarah, you know better!)

The problem is I’m also extremely sentimental. I still have the Disney Music Days t-shirt from my high school senior band trip, the middle school musical t-shirt (which I still wear, by the way!). My sentimental nature doesn’t just extend to plausibly useful stuff. I have the Ticketmaster confirmation (not just the tickets, the confirmation) of the hockey game which was my first date with my husband. I just can’t stand to throw it out, it’s my memories! I’m also extremely frugal – those chips are only slightly expired, they may not be as crunchy but they are still editable! I also hate throwing out anything that could be useful one day, regardless of whether it is useful now, like the shower curtain from my first apartment when the last two homes I’ve lived in have had shower doors.

A while ago I came across this advice: take a picture. You can always look back at the picture and remember, and a picture doesn’t take up space. Shirts I never wear can be donated, Ticketmaster confirmations can be recycled, and we can better organize what we have left.

Every time I move something to the trash pile or the good will pile, I feel a twinge of sadness that it’s leaving my life. I will never hold it again. But the sadness doesn’t last. Still, I can’t completely change overnight. That shower curtain I mentioned? Okay, so that’s still in a box in the garage. Hey, no one is perfect! Each pass through the house, I’ll get a little better.

Good bye, stuff, and thanks for the memories! Although, it might be time to purchase a bigger hard drive. Good thing Black Friday is coming up!

I spent way too many hours in bed this morning, with a bad migraine. I want to blame it on standing in a small room full of cleaning chemicals for a few hours yesterday. Oh the other hand, one zone down – the master bathroom, and another almost finished – the guest bathroom.

The biggest challenge was the water stains. Our house has hard water. Very hard water. The worst hit was the tub in the master bathroom, which had acquired a raised blue stain around the drain – a combination of the calcium and soap scum. We had tried all the housing cleaning products we had to no avail. They were so bad I thought we were going to have to hire professionals to come in with the super strong chemicals, stay-out-of-the-house-for-24-hour chemicals.

Saturday we went back off to Target to acquire some new products to try. The winner: Comet. It still took 4 applications to get it cleaned up, but it’s finally gone. Some of our other cleaning products we tried weren’t as remarkable. We tried Kaboom Foamtastic for the toilets, which sprays on purple and turns white when it’s finished. The sides of the toilet ended up being too slick, and it slid down into the bowl before changing colors.

I still have to recaulk the shower, but I think I’ve had enough of the heavy chemicals for now. (Yes, I know caulk isn’t a heavy chemical, but there’s still a faint smell from the others.) For now, I’m moving on to the office, where most of the work involves organizing and not scrubbing.

Every fall I think “My house is a mess, I should clean it! As soon as the SIGIR deadline has passed…”. And I by clean I really mean organize. Donate old things we no longer use to good will, dispose/recycle of electronics that no longer work. Sure enough Spring comes around and I get distracted with something: School Work, Internships, Weddings. I usually do two half-houses passes a year, either tackling the downstair or the upstairs, but really what I need to do it all at once.

This years SIGIR deadline has come and gone nearly two months ago, and you couldn’t tell by the disorder chaos that is my home. No more.
Today I got out the scrub brush and got cracking. We’re not just talking clean, were talking Monica-Geller-scrub-the-toilet-brush clean. (Not even kidding on that, I already scrubbed down the toilet brush).

My goals are tri-fold. Clean, Organize, and Fixup.

Clean. This one is pretty self evident, but scrub down every possible surface.

Organize. A few weeks before packing to go to Hawaii we made a note that we were running out of toothpaste. I found a three tube pack under the sink in the guest bathroom. Being a three pack, it must have come from Costco, but our membership had expired over 18 months ago. Yes, we had toothpaste and we had ample supply of toothpaste and we didn’t even know it for probably two years. Did you know toothpaste expires? Another cuplrate for me is deodorant. For some reason I always thinking I’m out, but never am. By getting organize we know how much of each item we have, and what not to waste our money buying more of.

Fixup. We have a list of minor imperfections in our house. The previous owner had secured the toilet paper holder directly into drywall, so of course it’s starting to fall now. The water pressure is low in the guest bathroom sink. As we clean up we’re making a note of all the little things (and fixing a few on the way.) One can’t tackle the honey-do list, if one forget’s what’s on it.

I’ve divided the house into 12 zones (including the garage). Spring Cleaning will not get the best of me this year!