Project Messy House: Plan B

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


I wrote a blog about a messy house awhile back about this great plan and how I was going to be victorious over the messy house and well, it didn't work.  My house is still a big mess.  So I came up with plan B.  You see, I have 3 children who are homeschooled and  under the age of 8 and a husband and a bunch of stuff in a 3 bedroom, ranch style home that is about 2000 square feet.  We do not have a huge amount of storage space, but we do have a bunch of junk that's only purpose is to be stored somewhere.  I read a blog a while back about cleaning/decluttering one room a month, well, my house has 9ish rooms in an open, some rooms are gigantic while others are small sort of way, so that just would not be very productive.  My plan is to divide the house into 4 sections and do a thorough cleaning and decluttering and reorganizing, remodeling, redecorating plan doing one section a month.  So every 4 months each section will move to the next level.  I think this could work.  I also read another blog about staging your home for living from the becoming minimalist site and this has inspired me and given me some great ideas.  Now I just need to put them into action.


The sections are as followed:


1.   The 20' x 20' chaos room will be transformed into a lovely adult art room where my husband and I will play music, watch movies we like, do crafty things such as woodworking, sewing, crochet and it will be decorated with art including our children's art and original arts that we have found, painted or had relatives paint for us.  The room will eventually be painted a charcoal behind the flat screen and a light grey on the other walls and have hard wood flooring without popcorn ceiling and possibly a nice 3 season room off of the back door with a basement under it in the future so that we have a nice storm shelter area.  This is my idea of staging this room for us to live in it.  So during the month of January, I'm doing phase one of this project.  I am getting clutter out of the room that does not fit in with this plan including all toys and kid type things.  My husband and I need our own space without tripping over blocks, dolls, cars, super heroes and whatever else ends up on the floor.  We need a place to relax that is especially for us and we have not had this since we have lived in this home because we could not figure out what to do with this room.  The kid type items will then be moved to the kitchen if they are art supplies, the living room for books and movies and their bedrooms for toys.  All we will have left in this room once we are finished with phase one will be a TV/stereo DVD player, drum set, my husband's guitars, a recliner, and a love seat.  My husband had plans to build a rectangular crafting table and we may put the dog cage under the table to get it out of the way from the rest of the house.  We also have a small bistro table that is going to be used for a sewing machine I got for Christmas about 8 years ago and have never used.  I have made a big dent in this room and I am confident that I will complete phase 1 by the end of January.  The next time I get to his room, I will more than likely paint it, but not this time around.  I don't want to feel overwhelmed by this project or I will give up and quit. 


2. Section 2 is a less daunting project.  It includes the kitchen and foyer area.  We have a fairly nice galley kitchen that is pretty long and skinny.  It is one of those kitchens that is sort of separate from the other rooms and I find it to be a nice little escape area.  The kitchen includes the kitchen basics, we really do not need much.  The more you have, the bigger a mess you could possibly have to clean.  I like to keep kitchen messes at a minimum, so we will probably be purging a lot of our kitchen items when I get to this room.  First, we have the goal of going down to 1 plate and 1 bowl per person and possibly 1 frying pan, 1 large pot, 1 small pot, just the basics.  We have two large storage closets in the kitchen also and my plans are to really organize these and figure out exactly how we will use them.  I have not put a lot of thought into this project yet because that it my February project and I am still mentally focused on the chaos room transformation.  We do not have a den, but I have my own business, so the kitchen is also my office space.  I have my laptop, a little bill organizer caddy, and a work and important documents filing cabinet.  There is an extra little table in here that could make this an eat in kitchen, but since we are homeschooling, it is where I keep art supplies and I have a 2nd filing cabinet that will also be used for art supplies along with a drawer and cabinet.  This area still needs a little work, but like I said, I am not mentally focused on that right now. 


The 2nd part of section 2 is our foyer area.  It has a fish tank, a dog cage and some tropical plants and usually some junk piled in weird places.  My goal is for it to have a fish tank and plants only.  In February, the floors and counter tops and cabinets will be completely scrubbed and organized.  We do have some cracked tile that needs replaced and there are also crevices at the bottom of the wall and some possible cracks at the corners of the windows that need to be filled in and we need some screens in the kitchen windows.  It may also be painted.  My husband also has a goal of replacing our front door with gothic/contemporary solid wood doors with big metal knockers and our backdoor also needs to be replaced.  However, phase one of this project will just be cleaning and organizing and decluttering by purging some unneeded items.  Oh, the drain is doing something strange now, so we also need to call a plumber in February.  For the time being, I am using a bucket rather than the sink.  :)


3. Section 3 includes our living room/great room/dining room/library/kid room, back hall and laundry/utility/cat room. The living room/great room/dining room/library/kid room is basically a giant, multipurpose room.  I think it is something like 30' x 17' or something like that.  It's huge.  It includes a large dining room table, a lovely baby grand piano, a large floor to ceiling flagstone fire place, a recliner, coffee table, couch, kid table and bookshelves with the children's books, informational books, and photo books.  It also has two TVs.  One is for watching TV/DVDs while the other is for VHS tapes.  The library/kid area is the closest room to the kid's bedrooms, so this is hopefully all the further their toys will get.  I want them to feel like they can play with their toys outside of their bedrooms, so they do not feel isolated and at the ages of 7, 4 and 2, they need to still play with toys to learn and be content and happy.  However, I am tired of our house having toy flooring.  So instead of taking one step and stepping on a super hero, the next step a princess costume and then step three being a car, I would like to walk through a room and step on either carpet or tile.  Is that too much to ask?  I have a Pak-n-play in place for my 2 year old to have his own little area to play with his cars and not be bothered.  I was using it as time-out area for him when he hits his sister, but now he request to go in there because I think when he starts a war zone, he is really just wanting some personal space and this is a nice little area for him to have this.  The pak-n-play is a temporary item in this room that works well for the moment.  We will pack it away as soon as it does not seem necessary anymore, but at this time, we still use it daily for baby boy.  This room is actually in pretty good shape in relation to organizing and decluttering because as I was working on the chaos room, this room had some work done also, so this room should not be a lot of work in March when it's turn comes up on the rotation.  A future project may be to redo the flooring and ceiling and some of the paint, but not this time around.


However, the back hallway will be a job.  I do not even know what is in this area.  It has become a storage area and is where there was once a front door, but at some point, someone must have decided that it needed to be closer to the driveway and added a new front entrance.  So we have a 2nd front door with shelves against it at the moment.  There is also a coat closet that is just full of disorganized junk.  So project back hall will probably take up most of my time in March.  Eventually, I would like to transform this area into a half bath or a full bath with a small stand up shower.  I would also like to put a wall where there is a door.   But for now, it is a big chaos corner and phase one will be to eliminate the chaos in this part of our home. 


The laundry room/utility room, cat room could use a good scrub down, but beyond that, it should not be a lot of extra work in March.  It could use new flooring, but it is back and out of the way, so this is not a huge deal to me. 


4. Section 4 is the bedrooms, bathrooms and hallway.  These are maintained fairly well, so aside from deep cleaning and going through clothes and toys and maybe rearranging a bit, there will not be a lot of overwhelming work for this project in April.  In the future, I do have interest in new ceilings, flooring, paint touch ups and a bathroom remodel, but for this year a deep cleaning  and some decluttering should do the trick for this section. 


Then I will start over with the lovely music/entertainment/arts and crafts room that will be so much less overwhelming than the first time around.  I really think this plan will work.  I do dishes and laundry daily, trash take out as needed, bills twice a month, and weekly vacuum and dusting that is more of a group effort rather than just me, so I hope this plan works and I hope it also gives you some ideas if you have some of the same challenges I am facing as a homeschooling family of five and figuring out a good system to keep a nice, educational environment that we can feel proud of rather than embarrassed if someone randomly stops by for a surprise visit.  My goal is to stage our home for living.  It will probably be an ongoing project, but we can take our time and do what we can.  There is no rush and one section a month is very workable.  I love unschooling, writing, being creative, researching, but I hate cleaning with a passion.  I am hoping this plan makes it easier to maintain my home so that it no longer interferes with my family's passions.