RRR Room by Room- Playroom Deep Clean, or "Off With Their Heads"

I'm jumping to the playroom today because it is in desperate need of a cleaning. I'm only about halfway finished cleaning it up, but I plan on getting the kids involved with the rest, so blog break time.

Clean Side

When we were house shopping, we knew we wanted a basement with a playroom for the kids. We wanted a space where the kids could relax, be loud, and make a mess. The house we are in now has a great playroom, lots of space and light, away from the rest of the house so they can scream, wrestle, and just go crazy. My obstetrician told me when we had Boy 3 that we should pad the walls of one room, put a cage over the light, and  just let the boys go nuts in there. This playroom is about as close to that as we're going to get, and all of us love it.

The problem with the kids having their own space is that I am not around to supervise all the different things they get into. The kids "clean" the basement at least once a week, but really what they do is stuff and hide and scootch things around the room. Last week was even messier because I banned television and video games as part of No Impact Week. They were into everything. When I ventured into KidLand today to do a deep clean, I had to wade through Lego bits, random train tracks, and all sorts of board game shrapnel. Most girls with big brothers have decapitated Barbies, and our girls are no exception. They should make a series of dolls with the heads already off and save everyone the trouble. I can see it now, "Barbie Antoinette", "Barbie Queen of Scots"...ooh my repurpose wheels are turning...

Ahem.

What the crap does this have to do with RRR? Well, the lack of putting-away-ness of my children means that many board games, Lego sets, Nerf darts, Barbies, end up trashed. We have two new Lego board games the kids got for Christmas, and as I'm cleaning I'm finding bits of them all over the place. The chances of us being able to recreate what was originally in the box? Zilch, I betcha.

And the batteries...oh man.

So, I'm beginning by cleaning this room the way I clean everything:

• Starting in the far corner of the room from the door.
• Clean the room in rows from left to right, top to bottom
• Sort things into piles as I go. Example: a Lego pile, a train track pile, a book pile, a pile of things that don't go in this room. 
• Nothing stays where it doesn't belong. 
• Once the whole room is in piles, figure out the best storage and then put them away
• Dust
• Wipe
• Vaccuum
• Beat the children if they don't keep it this way (Kidding.)

Dirty side

Like I said, I still have the other side of the room to deal with, but what I need to research now is finding ways to make it simple for the kids to put pieces away when they're finished. I could watch them every time they play with anything, but that would just make everyone unhappy. I've been to homes where the toys are all sorted by type and the kids all put them back where they came from...maybe I'm a bad role model. I've never been good at keeping things clean or organized, and I don't know how to create a system or motivation for my kids. Ideas?

RRR Room by Room- Laundry Room backcasting

SNOW DAY TODAY!

Last night we were pretty sure school would be cancelled today. The snow was piling up, and there was no sign of it stopping. We woke up this morning, and sure enough, school is cancelled. At this very moment the boys are calling their neighborhood friends & planning to walk across the street to the school & build massive snow forts on the field. That way they'll have forts to play in when school is back in session. So. Fun.

 I jumped on the snow day opportunity to have the kids put their laundry away. I'm not going to spoil their stay-at-home fun by making them clean all day, but I couldn't pass up the chance to get the laundry room cleared out. The deal was, put away all your laundry (including hang ups) and you have the rest of the day to yourself. A pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.

Tops cleaned off

I've been doing load after load of laundry since Monday. I've kept it going every waking moment. Literally. We have these giant capacity He machines, and I am thrilled to announce that the laundry is d.o.n.e. There is a start on a new load of darks, and there is a load in each machine right now, but that's it. I have officially caught up.

All the laundry that is left to wash

 

Rediscovered the floor

I haven't put the girls' laundry away yet, you can see it there on the shelves. That's because they decided to pull EVERYTHING, all the bins, containers, everything, out of their closets and dump it all in the middle of their room. Once that is cleaned up (hopefully after nap) I will have everything put away. Except the socks that I've washed since Monday's Sock Go Fish game. All those left socks you've lost? They end up at my house, I think. Still, to have it this close to totally done is unheard of.

I have serious doubts about keeping it this way, but greenness, cheapness, and cleanliness demands it. We have a TON of clothes. It's wasteful and silly. Once everything is put away, it's obvious that "I don't have anything to wear!" is completely untrue. I don't need to buy more, and if I keep the laundry up, I'll know when I do.

Beginning with the end in mind, imagining my ideal goal of a laundry room that looks like this all the time...how awesome.

~Backcasting~
The Dream: To have no more than a load of laundry waiting at any given time. To have no more than a week's worth of wash on the shelves or hanging up at any one time. To be able to leave the laundry room door standing wide open, even when company is coming over. To have a eco-friendly, organized, sustainable laundry system.

Steps, from last to first

• We need to put our clean laundry away at least twice a week. Wednesday night and Saturday morning might work. 
• I need to do each load from wash to dry to fold immediately.
• I need to wash a load of laundry every day, to keep it going.
• I need a bin for each type of laundry in the laundry room.
• I need to tell the fam the new routine, and enforce it until it is habit. 
• I need the dirty laundry sorted into towels/bedding, darks, and whites.
• I need the dirty laundry brought up and sorted at least twice a week. Let's combine this with the putting away of the clean, so as to minimize fights.
• I can make the run around during the day if I need more clothes for a load.
• Efficiency demands only running the washer/dryer when there is a full load.

I'm finding making a list of steps backward like this kind of confusing. At least for laundry.

Side Steps/Extras:

• When I get to the bedroom RRRs, I am going to switch us to the file form of clothing storage.
• I'd like to bring some things of beauty into the laundry room to put on the shelf behind the machines. No reason the room has to be a dungeon.
• I've put a bowl on the dryer to throw in the random pocket flotsam that appears in the wash (like erasers, little toys, money). 
• I have a bag for donations in the closet, for things that I'm not going to hand down.  

Green Goals:

• We have high efficiency machines, so that's great.
• We have blinds up on the window that the sun shines in. 
• We need to switch the light bulb to a CFL when this one burns out
• I'd like to try making my own laundry detergent. Keep thinking that, never get around to it.
• Switch back to line drying in the spring. There isn't time or room for indoor air drying all our wash.

This must not be allowed to happen again. 

It can be done. Oh yes. It can be done.

RRR Room by Room- Laundry Room...theoretical deep clean

The laundry room is across the hall from our office. Once upon a time, long before we moved in, it was a bedroom. It's a nice, large, out of the way room in which we can heap pile upon pile of our dirty laundry. Seven people dirty a lot of clothes.

I can't catch up. I hate laundry, not the washing, but the folding. I have been meaning to do a deep clean of the laundry room for days, and I've been avoiding it. It's overwhelming. Blankets and socks and jeans...oh my. Because I've been so remiss at actually doing the laundry, it's holding up my efficiency checklist, and my blogging. If I wait until I've caught up the laundry, I'll never blog again.

Why is it important to have the laundry done?
1. I would be calmer if the kids knew where their clothes were & didn't need me to chase them down. (Are they hanging in the laundry room? Are they hanging in your closet? Are there any clean pants? The suspense is killing us.)
2. When the laundry gets behind, so does my cloth diapering. We have to switch to disposables. It's like pouring money down the drain, and it's such a polluting mess. The inserts aren't an issue, but the covers have to air dry, so if I get behind, we have to wait.
3. Wrinkles! Running the dryer to de-wrinkle clothes: not eco-friendly.
4. Knowing who really needs clothes & who doesn't. Boy 1 & 2 are growing like crazy. Keeping them in clothes is a trick, but if I have them all washed & they are put away, I can tell what they are really running low on, and what they aren't. Plus, if I had all the laundry caught up, I could sort out the outgrown stuff & post it on threadUP.

So the meantime solution:

Piles & baskets full of humiliation

I've made piles. Stuffed things in baskets. Scootched all the dirty laundry to one corner of the room. For the record both my He washer and dryer have been running all day. So there has been a little progress. My embarrassment at this full disclosure (which isn't full at all, you don't get to see the rest of the room. Hideous.) hopefully will inspire me to keep pushing the laundry through. 

Some plans to get the job done:

Sock basket

• Tonight we're playing Sock Go Fish with the kids. This involves the giant basket of socks which I refuse to fold (I hate hate hate pairing, folding, sorting socks. h.a.t.e. it.). We pull out the sock basket, each of us grabs out 5 socks and take turns looking for matches. "Do you have a Hanes with green letters?" "Go fish." 

• The children need to put their laundry away. They each have a shelf in the laundry room with their name on it. The shelves are filling up as I attempt to get all this laundry done. It needs to go into their dressers & closets, rather than having them gather in the laundry room to get ready for school every morning. 

• A routine. There has to be a way to make laundry a part of my daily routine. I've tried the Fly Lady way, but I'm really bad at sticking to it for long, and it doesn't allow for all my crafting, content managing, blogging, kid playing time. It's too restrictive. Maybe a load every morning & one every night? I hate schedules, but something has to happen so that the laundry gets did.

I have to get this room under control and then find time & energy efficient ways to keep it going. 

Sad 'n' Saggy

Lame.

I found a retractable clothesline at Fred Meyer this week, which cost about $20. I'm a little worried about how I'll like line drying, and if I'll be able to stick to it. Some people are more likely to stay the course with something if they have laid out money for it. I'm not that way. Once the money is gone, it's gone, so I'm not inspired to stick to things just because they were expensive.  Twenty bucks isn't a ton of money, but I was pretty sure I could do it cheaper.

I bought a skein of clothesline, two eye bolts, a couple of openable links, and some clothespins for under $10.

Our yard really isn't the right dimensions for a clothes line, no trees and it's 35 feet or so across. Putting in the line was a tad annoying, looking for the right size drill bit (it turned out to be in the hammer drill, I couldn't get it out, so I ended up just sticking with the hammer drill. That thing is LOUD.), trying to work around the ivy on the porch which the previous owner stapled to the supports to help it climb, finding out that while one link opened wide enough to accommodate the eye bolt, the other didn't. Just little diy nuisances.

I finally got the thing installed. We have high efficiency front-loaders, so a lot of the water spins out. I'm hoping things will dry quickly on a line. I started with a lighter blanket that I washed last night; I wanted to see if I need a center support for the line. Answer:

Pay no attention to the dying grass...

Uh, yeah. I need a support

I was hoping to find something to repurpose as a support, but there isn't much around here that would work. I tried turning the ladder ball PVC piping into a T...yeah broke that. So I have to shop around. I would have had this same issue with the retractable line, the yard is just a little wide. Hopefully I find a way to support it, I don't want to put the money into an umbrella dryer or the kind that bolts onto the house.

Here's a great resource to see all the options out there: Tip the Planet

Back to it

We went out of town this weekend, up to visit some friends in Portland. As we were driving up there (and now that I've started this journey, the gas expenditure seems like a guilty pleasure) we passed some wind turbines outside of Condon, OR. I really love the way they look, all across the hillside. I would be furious if there were housing developments in the same place, I hate seeing developments creep up a the foothills. But there's something sort of majestic and exciting about turbines. I wonder if that's just because they're relatively new? Or because they signify clean energy? I worry that some day science will discover that they disrupt the air stream, or are bird hazards, or something. But for now, the massive energy pinwheels delight me. 

As far as around the house, we've really cut down on our dish water consumption. If you remember, running the water when I pre-washed the dishes used a sink-full of water: 

So we've been putting just the tiniest bit of water in the sink to rinse all our dishes. While it's even more disgusting than the sink-full, it's saving a lot of water: 

We've also been using the bucket in the shower while we wait for the water to heat up. We have one stretch of lawn along the side of the house that is a pain to water with the sprinkler because it's so narrow between the neighbor & our place. We're using the bucket to water that stretch of lawn. 

I'm excited to start local veggie shopping for baby food. I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was going to start steaming my own veggies, and I needed to buy a steamer. I had planned on buying the kind that goes in the bottom of a pot, but she had an electric steamer she doesn't use. She gave it to me. w00t! 

On a roll

Today has been a fun one for reducing and repurposing.

I finally got to the store yesterday,  to buy from the bulk section. I bought a gallon of vinegar and a pound of baking soda. The whole lot cost $3.18. While I was there, I perused the bulk goodies to see how I could cut down on packaging. Dog food, pasta, pancake mix...why have I not been buying everything in bulk? It's cheaper, less waste, I can get exactly the quantities I want...I'm all over this.  (I even used a Gerber baby snack canister to store the baking soda once I got it home.)

Today, it was Boy 3's turn to clean the toilets (they're on rotating chore detail) so we made toilet cleaner using the recipe I found the other day. The boys were tickled by the frothy craziness (a volcano of toilet cleanliness) that ensued. It's the first time they haven't complained about toilet cleaning.

Boy 3 and toilet cleaner fixin's

We also made an all-purpose cleaner out of 1/2c vinegar, 1/4c baking soda, and 2 liters of water. The little spray bottle I had wasn't big enough for that much cleaner, but awesomely enough, the nozzle fit the top of the pop bottle.

Pop bottle of all-purpose cleaner

The toilets turned out clean, there were no nasty chemicals, we saved on packaging and cost, AND we repurposed one of the oodles of pop bottles we have around here.

Speaking of pop bottles...

We've had several get-togethers at the house lately and we've ended up with a lot of extra 2-liter bottles. While they're recyclable, we decided to look for ways to reuse first, to cut down on our waste. The kids have been making money this summer, mowing lawns, taking out the trash, and caddying for Grandpa on the golf course, but not a one of them has a piggy bank or a wallet. They've never really had money before this summer. So today we made banks out of bottles.

Painting pop bottles on the back patio

We painted the bottles with paint samples we inherited from my sister-in-law that have been sitting in our craft room collecting dust. We cut a slot in the top to put money in, and when they want it out, there's a little trap door cut in the bottom back. They had a blast making them and it didn't cost a thing.

I didn't need a piggy bank, so I made a "submarine" for the girls. They played with it in the bath this afternoon, floating Army guys & Littlest Pet Shop animals around the tub.

Submarine on the open sea

I'm feeling like I can do this.