Crunch-Time Cleaning Guide

It seems the holidays seem to burst upon us earlier and earlier every year.  With our busy lives, it may be a lot harder to find time to deep clean your home before company arrives.  But what do you do if your house is a near disaster and you have company coming soon?  Today's post will walk you through just what to do ...

Scenario:  You work all day, then have to get dinner on the table, do the dishes, get the kids to their after-school activities, help the kids with their homework, and throw a load of laundry in before you crash from exhaustion for the day.  Or, you work swing shifts, double shifts, or odd hours which throws your whole balance of life off.  What about stay-at-home or work-at-home moms?  You’re either worn out from a day of homeschooling, or you just can’t seem to get yourself motivated to do the decluttering that you know needs done.  You keep putting it off and putting it off until you suddenly realize that your child’s birthday party is the following week at the same time you realize that there is absolutely no WAY you are going to get the house in tip-top shape by then.

So what should you do?

As always … don’t panic!  As you have heard me say before, it’s not as important to have a clean and clutter-free house as it is to make your guests feel entirely welcome in your home.  If you feel embarrassed at having them there (seeing your mess), they will feel embarrassed to BE there.  So bottom line is whatever doesn’t get done … just doesn’t get done.  Let it go and concentrate on being a gracious host or hostess.

Even if you HAVE left cleaning and decluttering to the last day or week before the big day, there’s still much you can do and actually do in an organized way.  Below is a step-by-step “crunch-time” guide to getting the house company-ready.

Step One:

• Try to locate some large boxes or containers that you can use to put clutter in.  You will want at least ONE box or container for EACH room that you need to declutter (aka … whatever rooms your guests will see).
• If you do not have any boxes large enough, try asking at your local stores.  Smaller boxes will work too … you just might need more than one per room.  As a last resort (if you cannot find enough boxes or containers) garbage bags will work too.  But again … this would be a last resort method only.  Just the mere fact that it is a “garbage” bag lessens the importance of what is inside it.  Plus, you run the risk of the items inside getting broken from being tossed around inside the bag.

Step Two:

• Get a large marker and label the boxes on the outside with the name of the room that the contents belong in.

Step Three:

• Line the boxes up nearby as you declutter each room.  As you are clearing out the clutter, put whatever misplaced items you come across into the box of the room it goes in.  See?  You are actually doing the first step in organizing anything this way … pairing like, with like.  Again, it’s okay to have more than one box per room depending on how much clutter is in that room … just label it accordingly.
• Keep doing this for each room until the only thing you have to do in that room is dust and vacuum (and possibly make the bed if you are in the bedrooms).

Step Four:

• Locate a room or area in your home that your company WON’T see (like the garage, laundry room, basement, etc.).  Put the boxes in there with the labeled side facing out so you can see it.
• In the days/weeks after your company has left, put it on your daily schedule to empty an entire box each night.  If the box is really full, you’re short on time, or you have multiple boxes for each room … you can break the contents of each box up.  You can do this by either taking a set number of items out each night and putting them away, or fill up a smaller container that you can easily carry to where it needs to go.  The key is to make sure the contents get PUT AWAY.  The box is not to be considered the new home for these items.  Trust me, you will just end up filling the rooms up with new clutter and then what will you do the next time if you are ever in a cluttered crunch time again?  Eventually, you’ll run out of rooms to stash your stuff.

The one exception I would make to the no garbage bag rule is for dirty laundry.  Again … this can be done in an orderly fashion.  Start making piles (separated by color) in a central location to your laundry clutter … like the hallway outside of your bedrooms.  Then, put one color-coded pile into each garbage bag and place (hopefully) in your laundry room.  Then, empty the bags each day/evening by doing a load of laundry until it’s done.

Don’t forget to enlist the help of others in your household during the above process.  They can help sort their dirty laundry into piles and you can give them items from the boxes that belong to them to be put away.  You didn’t make all the clutter yourself.  You shouldn’t have to deal with all the clutter yourself.

That’s it!  No, you may not have had time to deep clean but, as long as you make your guests feel welcomed, no one is even going to notice … uh, unless you have a child like mine that will INVITE company into one of the “stash” rooms because he put something he made in there for safe keeping and now he wants our guests to see it!  Gotta love those kids, right?   ; )

The above post was originally posted to my website at www.lisaorganizeslife.com.  For tons more ideas and inspiration for getting organized, please visit me there.