Since the house nowadays can get turned upside down in the blink of an eye I made some home resolutions to help me keep things in better shape. They're four simple, quick things that have made a big, huge difference in the shape that our house stays in on a daily basis.
1) Before Tessa goes to bed, we have her help us gather up her toys from around the house and put them back into her room. This works great because she loves helping pick up, and it doesn't sit well with her when her room is messy. Plus, this usually takes all of five minutes.
2) We don't go to bed without doing all the dishes and wiping down the kitchen counter tops.
3) We don't go to bed without cleaning off our coffee table and our dining room table--both places that tend to collect lots of crap.
4) In the morning, we make up Tessa's bed and our bed.
This doesn't mean that we don't have baskets of clean laundry stacked up beside the made bed waiting to be put up or that my desk isn't a mess of papers, but just having these few areas neat has given me such a boost. And because they're things that we do together as a family, these tasks go so much quicker than if I were trying to do them on my own with a baby in my arms.
As always, there are so many projects I want to take on around the house this year, and most all of them involve slapping a coat of paint on things. First and foremost, I want to repaint my kitchen (mint!) and my kitchen cabinets (white!). I want to repaint the concrete floor of my front porch (forest green!) because the brick red color there now is peeling off. The porch swing is crying out for paint, too, as is all of the old patio furniture.
Speaking of projects, here's one Nekos and I tackled last weekend:
The janky shelves we built in our living room two years ago had been bothering the crap out of me for the longest time. So we spent $24 on floor moulding at Home Depot to camouflage what was one of our less successful DIY projects. Much better.
