FLYing and Getting Control of Your Clutter

I don’t know about your house, but my house often falls into a state of disorganization. By the middle of the summer, I’m completely out of my cleaning routine, and the kids have been here all day, every day making messes! We recently had houseguests, and as I scrambled around giving everything a lick and a promise, as my grandmother used to say, I was thinking, “there has got to be a better way!” No one likes living in chaos and clutter, but that’s exactly what we had been doing for the past several weeks.

Back when my children were very little, I remember complaining to my mother: I just couldn’t find a way to keep all of my rooms under control with a baby and a toddler underfoot! She had recently begun following a sort-of-new-at-the-time website called Flylady, and she told me all about it. I signed up and did really well with the program! Remembering that, I decided to start it again, and I’m already seeing great results.

The premise is that you want to never see dirt again. The way this works is by establishing a number of routines, one at a time, so that you are constantly maintaining your home. This makes it so that whether someone drops over for an unexpected visit or you have to call the plumber to do some emergency work on your master bathroom toilet, you’re not embarrassed by the state of your home, and can feel free to open the door and let your guest (or plunger-wielding superhero, as the case may be) in.

The Flylady, Marla Cilley, calls herself a recovering SHE (side-tracked home executive) who used to suffer from CHAOS (can’t have anyone over syndrome). She encourages newbies, called flybabies, to start by simply shining their sinks. A shiny sink leads to clean kitchen counters, gleaming kitchen floors, vacuumed living rooms, and so on. Some of her routines include having you get dressed to shoes first thing in the morning (no more lounging in your jammies!), swishing-and-swiping your bathroom while you’re in there, and conducting weekly “home blessing hours,” in which you throw away all of those magazines that have been piling up, change the sheets on the beds, vacuum, and things like that. She points out that you’re not behind, so just jump in where you are and success will come.

Since the beginning of last week, I’ve been up, showered and dressed (to makeup, not to shoes… we don’t wear shoes in the house!) very early in the morning, and I also have laundry done well before lunch each day. We actually had to call the plumber regarding a leaky toilet, and I didn’t even have to give it a second thought. I knew my master bathroom, usually the most neglected room in the house, was clean!

Go check out the Flylady site if you haven’t already. It’s free! Even if you’re stuck under clutter and grime, soon you’ll be FLYing (finally loving yourself)!

Have you had success with Flylady?