A big part of this deslobification process is dealing with my tendency to make things harder than they need to be.
Sometimes it’s imagining a project to be larger and more time-consuming than it should be. Sometimes it’s putting something small off, for no real reason, only to have it turn into something large. Sometimes it’s not knowing, or seeing, a trick that would make a task easier.
Most of the time, it’s a mental thing. A mental thing that might be overcome simply by making a decision.
According to my self-created-according-to-what-works-at-this-time-in-my-life weekly task schedule, I dust and vacuum on Fridays. For the last two weeks, since I’ve been keeping up with most of my daily checklist, on a mostly daily basis, the house has stayed fairly orderly.
For the past two weekends, when Sunday night comes, and it’s time for the doorbell to ring and for our home group members to arrive, I’ve been pretty stress-free. Partly, that’s because these same people have been coming over every week for more than a year and I’m not as worried about perfection. But it’s also because I’m okay with how the house looks after doing my weekly tasks.
Somehow, though, I still have a part of me that assumes that I need to rush through the house with a duster and the vacuum cleaner at 5:55.
And maybe I do. Maybe someone would care that there’s two days worth of dust on the TV.
But I don’t care. I’ve decided that I don’t care. I mean, really . . . I NEVER dusted pre-blog.
Never.
Except when my MIL was coming over.
And even then, sometimes I just turned off the overhead lighting for ambiance . . . and hoped she didn’t brush up against anything.
I’ve decided that dusting on Friday is good enough.
I'm adding this word into my family's vocabulary:
deslobification
Love it! LOL!
Well at least you dust. I'm ashamed to admit that I can't remember the last time that was done around here… guess that means I should have a schedule too.
How can it be that even after going through all of your old posts I'm still surprised there are people like me. I truly thought I had to be the only person to dust so little.
I just dusted about a month's worth of dust off my living room furniture yesterday, only because the sun was coming just right into the front windows and it was highlighting the fuzziness of the tabletops. It took me all of five minutes to make it look pretty again.
I say good enough is good enough. Loved your post.
So strange isn’t it? When I am on an awesome cleaning streak and feel on top of things I have to absolutely RESTRAIN myself from “overcleaning”. I think because I love how everything is so pretty and sparkly that I start to obsess and see every tiny imperfection. Then I become exhausted and sick of it because no one can keep a house that perfect all the time!! This all or nothing mentality is hard to get over.
My husband helps me by saying it doesn’t have to be “microscopically” clean! He taught me to just put everthing in it’s proper place even if it isn’t wiped down or sanitized first. Ahhhhh! I finally got it when I would walk in and the house looked “clean” not insane OCD clean but tidy, orderly with no wierd smells, overflowing garbage, and strange piles of stuff that needed to be “cleaned” first before I could put them away. I humbly told him his way is better than my rollercoaster ride! It also makes regular cleaning so much faster!
I have also noticed regular people only really notice cleaned off horizontal surfaces, an empty sink and no bad smells.
You may have dealt with this in a separate post, but you’ve mentioned that you’re allergic to dust, right? So, um, shouldn’t you dust a LOT? I only ask because my mother is allergic, and our house was dusted top to bottom (ie, moving everything, basically, and dusting everything, including baseboards, etc) every week. Sometimes she even used a vacuum to dust, haha.
ps. Love your blog.