30 Day House Cleaning Challenge: Day 1

Yesterday, MoneySavingMom and a ton of other bloggers kicked off a 30 Day House Cleaning Challenge.  I was a little bit on the fence about if I wanted to blog along with it or not.  I've sort of taken a blogging hiatus lately, my mind being on my tutoring mostly.  But now that I'm doing less of that I wanted to get back to blogging, and I actually have tons of posts in mind to share with you.  But, I also am needing to whip my house back into shape!  So, I thought that blogging along with this would give *me* motivation to stick with it and get it done.

I meant to post this last night, but I was so motivated to get stuff done around here yesterday, I actually wore myself out and was so tired I totally forgot about posting this yesterday!  Oops!  I guess I'm off to a pretty good start on the challenge, but not the blogging!

Using this list, yesterday's task was to surface clean living room and kitchen.

My living room was not too bad, as we had just had a long tedious struggle over the weekend getting the girls to pick up their things off the floor.  I'm fairly convinced that past infancy (when small objects are obviously magnified), they become completely invisible to children's eyes!

So, all I had left to do in the living room was to vacuum.  But, oh.....the kitchen!

I told you in my menu/declutter plan yesterday that I planned to spend 15 minutes each day cleaning my kitchen.  Well, I decided to begin with just the surfaces yesterday (stick to the challenge, right?) but I figured it would take me a bit longer, so I turned on PBS, set my timer for 20 minutes, and set to work wiping things down--counters, cabinets, appliances.   When the timer went off, I was *nearly* finished wiping all the kitchen surfaces. I had just sprayed down the stove top with my homemade orange vinegar spray (posting soon) so I kept going and got that finished up, but I still had to do dishes (several that had to be hand washed as well) and then sweep and mop the kitchen.  

I got all of that accomplished, plus washing 4 loads of laundry (I have to fold it all today....and of course we had a bed wetting last night so there is more bedding to wash) and preparing our soup for tonight...its all in the pot in the fridge, I just have to pull it out and pop it on the stove!

So, I was busy, busy, busy yesterday!  But, it was well worth it when my oldest got home from school and walked into the kitchen for her snack and said "Wow!  I like how you have the kitchen all clean and organized!"

We were even able to have a little relaxing family time after dinner.   We took the girls and their Dollar Tree kites from their Easter baskets and went over to the park for a bit.

I think it was a fabulous start to the month of April, and so very refreshing after the rough few weeks we've had around here!

How did your day go?

Today's challenge is cleaning the bathrooms, but I still want to spend 15 minutes in my kitchen, and get my laundry folded, but I'm pretty tired after that 4am bedwetting escapade, so we will see how it goes.  I'm also challenging myself to not take naps during the day.  This might be a rough one!  LOL