Spring Cleaning

My basement is soooo clean!  And we were sooooo tired yesterday!

Thankfully, we had already decluttered the playroom a couple of weeks ago.  Madden had sort of decluttered his room (to the extent that 16 year old boys are capable of).  So all we had to do yesterday was CLEAN.

Starting in his room, we dusted down all the cobwebs, moved the furniture and vacuumed behind everything, and dusted the entire room.  Then we did the same to the other rooms in the basement.

Then, while I scrubbed his bathroom from ceiling to floor, my able, energetic boys emptied the storage room.  The Little Princess cleaned inside the bathroom cabinet and did the mirror.  We cleared out some more unnecessary stuff, and moved on to the storage.

Okay, that required a lunch break.  THEN we tackled the storage and managed to consolidate some stuff, give away some stuff, and put it all back in neatly.  It's amazing how much easier it is to navigate in there!  The bittersweet thing is that I only have 2 boxes of baby clothes that have to be saved, and I've gotten rid of most of our hand-me-downs!  The youngest 3 have a box in their rooms, but that's all!!!

We managed to accomplish everything we did because we (mostly) worked together.  We did our schooling quickly in the morning, which wasn't too hard because Fridays are rather light. and then we all went to work together.  If I had had to do it all alone, it wouldn't have gotten done, or it would have taken twice as long.  I can't even imagine trying to empty the storage room on my own.  I can imagine how badly my back would have hurt if I did it all alone; it's bad enough as it was!

Sometimes I think it would be so much easier to just do it all myself and not have to crack the whip over the children.  Don't we all tend to think that?  I'm not the only one making messes around here and not cleaning up; I'm not the only one not dusting my room thoroughly every week; and I'm not the only one living here.  So I shouldn't be the only one doing the hard labor.  Plus, I believe I have a real duty to teach my children the proper way to clean so they'll have some idea what to do when they go away to college or move out.  Therefore, we work together.  Many hands do make light work.  We have our little episodes where little folks fight over cleaning the same thing, or stop working altogether, but we managed to hang in there for just about 3 hours to finish that whole floor.

Today, I worked on the garage with TMax for a couple of hours.  It's much, much better now!

I have something like 13 bags of stuff in my van to go to Goodwill tomorrow.  Our trash dumpster is full and trash day isn't until Friday!  Yet we tackle the upstairs tomorrow, and the main floor on Tuesday!  That will be a bit more challenging with daily activities and a full school schedule....