Years upon years ago, I discovered the Houseworks Holiday Plan, which would later be renamed the House & Holiday Plan. It was originally published on the OrganizedChristmas website, which has since shut down. Since I’d printed out all of the schedules, checklists, and printables in 2011, I was still okay to continue with my tradition of following the plan each autumn, which I’ve attempted to do every year.

I’ve never completed the entire plan. I think I’ve been attempting to complete it since 2005 or 2006, and I’ve never made it all the way through because there was no way to complete those room-specific decluttering and cleaning tasks in the one week allotments when you’ve got four children and you’re dealing with back-to-school activities. I was thinking on this predicament during one of my planning periods during the last week of teaching school this year and realized I could just start the plan earlier and schedule extra time for decluttering the kids’ bedrooms. Don’t you just hate it when you have such a simple idea that really should have occurred to you, like, a DECADE ago?!?! Ugh.

The house is destroyed, which was the expectation after spending a year studying and student teaching, so at least things aren’t worse than originally planned. Regardless, there’s a lot of work to do to get things back in shape around here. I hit the “go” button on the House & Holiday Plan this last week and will use the extra time to get things reorganized over the summer. I’ve allocated two weeks to each kid bedroom, my bedroom, and the craft room for a total of ten weeks of decluttering, deep cleaning, organizing and, hopefully, a little redecorating and prettying up.

I started with Nathaniel’s and Emily’s shared bedroom this week because: 1) It’s got the most stuff in it, and 2) We never did a thorough clean out/declutter when Emily went off to college in the fall because she decided at the last minute to live on-campus and I actually packed up her stuff while she was at class before dropping it off that evening. Yeah, I packed up my kid in less than twenty-four hours. (Last summer was super stressful!!) I was too busy to deal with the leftovers and it’s been waiting for me for almost an entire year to get back to it. Well baby, I’M BACK FOR IT.

I like to completely gut a room when I’m doing a deep clean–take out every last thing, physically touch everything à la Marie Kondo and decide if it’s going to be kept, donated, or thrown away. This means that my living room is currently holding every physical possession of Nathaniel’s and Emily’s. So, another mess in order to deal with the original mess. *mirthless chuckle*

But, man, does it feel good to empty out an engorged room, rearrange the furniture, deep clean that sucker, and then judiciously bring things back in. *satisfied sigh*

So that’s what I’m up to right now, and I plan to come back next Friday/weekend and show you some pictures of something organized. I do much better when I have deadlines, so there it is–let’s get a bedroom put back together and prettified.