Tackling Our Lists -- Spring Declutter

Knowing that I have to accomplish various tasks during this season, and knowing that I am not particularly full of motivation, I am praying to know which direction to go in.

First, let me talk about spring cleaning/decluttering.

Every May, I seem to do a thorough house cleaning and decluttering.    Blogging has been a great help in this.  Especially, having a camera has made a huge difference.    I can go back and look at different years and see what form my efforts took.  

These links will take you to different blogs of mine from past days.  Maybe eventually Chari and I will work on importing our old articles and posts over to here but for now it's easier just to link.

In 2008  I did something I called Household Journey.  I was reading Kathleen Norris's Quotidian Mysteries at the time.  That same year, I made these pretty Household Forms -- checklists to help me plan and get things done.   Wow, I must have had time to spare.   This was a very comprehensive household cleaning.

In 2009  I didn't have a May cleaning.    At that time I was really campaigning to move away from this house, and so in March (as soon as the snow started to melt) I did a cleaning tour and took pictures of things that needed to be improved or repaired.  I put the pictures on a private blog that I shared with my husband.   The pictures were ugly. Just closeups of household glitches.  So sorry, no pictures from that tour.

In 2010 I did an enormous decluttering.  I got rid of over 100 large trash bags full of stuff!  (either gave away or threw away).   I was reading a lot of minimalist blogs and had studied Father Dubay's Happy Are You Poor and it helped me dig deeper than I had in the past.

In 2011  I read Splendor in the Ordinary and then did a Spring Cleaning Challenge hosted by Mystie.   Scroll down in the Splendor index for the links to my version of the Challenge.

It looks to me like I alternate between really comprehensive-sweep years and lighter years and this year I'm due for the comprehensive level.    However, I have just come away from nearly a month of going through my parents' house and basically moving their effects out of the house (though I had a lot of help).  So I don't know if I am sort of mentally done with all-out effort for the year.

Another things is that I am pretty sure that whatever form my household sweep takes this 2012, it will have to include taking note of little problems.  There seem to be quite a few of those cropping up and Kevin has said that this year he will have more energy for doing some of the repair work.   Maybe his momentum will help me.

Chari does cleaning and household projects too, in fact she does them better than I do, because she paints rooms and her husband builds outbuildings -- a schoolroom and a fort -- where the family can store things.    She indexes things in rubbermaid bins with real computer labels.  ... the kind of thing I just don't get to.  But in the past she hasn't blogged her efforts.  Maybe now that she has an IPhone she will do it -- so much easier now to upload pictures!

Looking at these past years, I am wondering what to do this year.  Any ideas?  What are you doing for spring cleaning this year, if you didn't already do it in Lent?