Adventure #7-- Signing up for Flylady

She's apparently really into fly fishing. The things one learns...

Today I signed up for flylady. If you don't know about flylady, it's a daily email newsletter about little 15 minute projects you can do each day to keep your house de-cluttered and clean. I'm pretty sure doing flylady projects is going to be one of my new years resolutions. I'm going to try to do the projects over the next couple of weeks and then make my resolution decision.

I used to think that clutter, messiness, and dirty houses were the work of the devil. I also used to dust my baseboards every week. Several years ago I bought two large housekeeping books and read them cover to cover out of pleasure. I judged people who lived in gross, dirty, messy houses.

Then, just like so many things in my life, it all went out the window when I started studying for the CPA exam. In fact, JJ and I got into a bit of an argument over it a couple months ago, which we resolved by each getting a room in the house that we "owned"... his is the office, which is so perfectly neat and clean that you can see the tracks in the carpet from where he has vacuumed it. I am not allowed to mess up the office in any way.

Artist's representation of JJ's room. Except the pen cup and other
 items on the desk represent inappropriate levels of clutter. 

My room is the guest bedroom (aka "CPA studying central/ filth hovel") and, during the time I studied, was usually a disgusting heap of clothes that needed to be hung up, dirty dishes, test prep materials, papers, notebooks, and blankets. The rest of the house stayed fairly neat. Any clutter or mess I produced elsewhere came home to roost in my filth hovel at the end of the day. I cleaned the filth hovel once every week or two, though I was pretty good about bringing dirty dishes to the dishwasher on a daily basis. No matter what my filth hovel looked like, JJ was not allowed to fuss at me about it in any way.

Artist's representation of my filth hovel. JJ is the irritable looking bear on the left.

Well, the days of the filth hovel are limited.

The more time goes by since I passed the CPA exam, the more I feel like my old highly tidy and neurotic self again. Today I put everything in the house (including in my filth hovel) away, even though we aren't having guests. I might even dust the baseboards later.

The impetus to sign up for flylady came as I was reading this article on lifehacker about how to clean your house in 15 minutes or less. It's not *actually* cleaning, obviously, just decluttering and wiping down surfaces. The responses exploded with "that's not possible!" "oh yeah, maybe 15 minutes per room!" and all kinds of nay-saying. I was pretty shocked, because I honestly think I could "clean" my house in 15 minutes these days, if only I had motivation and direction. So flylady it is.