The 40 Day Challenge

Every so often my house starts to drive me completely insane. I become this crazy person obsessed with cleaning and organizing. Usually, though, I burn myself out halfway through one little project or become bogged down with searching for ways to better organize things or products that will help keep everything in order.

A couple of weeks ago, I got the organizing bug again. Bad. While browsing Pinterest for nifty ways to make my life better (because that clearly was a more productive use of my time than, ya know, actually cleaning), I came across a pin entitled "40 Bags in 40 Days." Basically, the idea is to pick out 40 areas in your house to clean, spend one day cleaning/organizing/purging stuff from each, and at the end you will have a cleaner house and less crap to boot. A lot of people do it over Lent but as I don't want to wait until next spring to do this, I'm starting now.

There are two reasons I'm a little obsessed with organization and purging unnecessary stuff from our lives. The first is I simply don't like having a lot of "stuff." We still have our fair amount of crap and stuff tends to start accumulating quickly so I figure the more I can get out of my house, the better I can deal with everything that comes into it.

The second reason is I have a hard time keeping myself organized. I can't blame it (entirely) on having a toddler, but she does exacerbate the problem. Most days I feel completely scatterbrained and I know it will get worse with two kids. I am trying to motivate myself now, before Schrodinger is born, to have a good system in place so things will be slightly less chaotic and I might have a fighting chance at salvaging some sanity.

Here, in no particular order, is my list of the 40 things I want to clean/organize in the next 40 days:

1. Master bathroom (linen closet)
2. Master bathroom (under my sink/drawers)
3. Pantry
4. Fridge/freezer
5. Guest room closet (part 1)
6. Guest room closet (part 2- yes it's bad enough I need two days)
7. Laundry room
8. Car
9. Playroom
10. Living room bookshelves
11. My desk
12. Study closet
13. Ella’s bathroom
14. Crawlspace
15. Magazines
16. Cookbook cabinet
17. Bins in study
18. My closet
19. Recycling
20. Spice cabinet
21. Entryway closet
22. Ella’s closet
23. Dresser drawers
24. Bonus room
25. Junk drawer in kitchen
26. Mudroom
27. Garage (workbench)
28. Garage (miscellaneous)
29. Jim’s clothes
30. China cabinets
31. Kitchen utensils
32. Baking cabinet
33. Miscellaneous cabinet in kitchen (this is where we put stuff we don't know where it should go)
34. Back patio
35. Ella’s art supplies
36. Clean exterior of kitchen cabinets
37. Clean oven, stovetop, and microwave
38. Butcher block (where we tend to dump everything)
39. Filing cabinet
40. Half bath

I won't do daily updates because honestly that would be tedious for me to write and even more tedious for you to read. I'll try to do a weekly accountability check-in to let you all know how it's working out for me.