Monday, April 23, 2012

Spring Cleaning Sprints // Week One Complete


Hooray! Our little home is a bit cleaner than it was a week ago. Progress.

Here is a refresher of the Week One assignments:

Weeknight Spruce:
Wipe down kitchen counters and cabinets

Saturday Sweep:
Clean refrigerator and freezer
Organize kitchen cupboards and flip shelves

Quickie Purge:
Get rid of 5 things

Peaceful Pause:
30 minutes spent refreshing YOU

While I did everything on the list this week, I did not do them on my originally assigned days! Oh well…that’s the purpose of my weekly plan - Do it when you can, but get it done.

I started on Monday with re-organizing the kitchen cupboards. I am so glad I did this first, because I found a leak under the kitchen sink! Thankfully, part of apartment life is the luxury of maintenance workers who fix these kinds of things for you. And we are blessed to live in a complex that has high quality workers. We got a brand new faucet installed by the next morning.

The discovery of the leak did slow my efforts, but I managed to finish organizing and wiped down the cabinet doors with that handy wood furniture polish solution I posted about.

Before the polish...

After the polish - it shines!
Remember those warped shelves I mentioned? Turns out they are stuck in there. I cannot flip them! So I rearranged things so the middle holds less weight. Hopefully this will slow the sagging.


Oh and I am so excited that as I was cleaning out the cupboards I found more than five things to purge. Some will be tossed, some donated, some given as gifts…hooray for getting rid of clutter!

I decided to finish my tasks on Tuesday evening. I really didn’t want to pull everything out of the fridge and freezer, but I am glad I did that too. There were a lot of crumbs and a huge pile of sticky goo on the bottom of the fridge.

What IS that stuff??
Goo-free and organized!
Then finally, I wiped off all the counters with a vinegar solution. They are now clean and crumb-free!

I actually had a couple Peaceful Pauses this week. One of my favorite ways to relax is lounging in our bed next to the window with the blinds open. I love to read or watch a show on Hulu while enjoying the sunlight. The other day, I was blessed to relax to the soundtrack of a rainshower. This is also the season for some beautiful sunsets. Our windows face East, so I get to see the reflection of the the sun's golden rays on the pond and trees outside our apartment. With the summer (yes, it's just about summer now) afternoon thunderstorms, we have amazing dark-clouded skies that only enhance the light show with rich blues, purples, pinks and oranges. For me, there is no better way to be refreshed than by enjoying God's creation.

On to Week Two!

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