One new habit at a time thread

[systemsaddict]

Ok, here's a new thread for those of us just focusing on picking up one new housekeeping habit at a time. My first habit will be laying clothes out the night before - what's yours?

my ds 3.5 loves to hoover so im thinking i should just keep leaving it in whatever room needs hoovered and directing his attention that way. child labour??

breaghsmum - that isn't child labour, its a gift from god - use it well

yes - can confirm hooverng doesn't wake Wee T at all, so no excuses there, also, hoover working fine again, so I had to do my five minutes this morning as planned. That's day 2 though - only 19 more to go! (and I also put on dishwasher last thing and emptied it first thing this morning, as per suggestions on the other thread. Was feeling virtuius and ahead of self until I fiddled with the tell and lost the picture and spent 1.5hours setting it back up again .

Now I did my allotted five mins hoovering but ended u only half way through kitchen floor when I stopped. so now kitchen is half dump and half clean and I will need to go and do more. Boo!

yay, you did good sausage!

I did get the clothes ready last night and can report a remarkable impact on my morning this morning. I had a whole extra half hour to play with before we left. I can't believe it adds half an hour to find clothes in the morning but I guess it's the combination of finding clothes while hunting down a high-speed 2 year old and soothing a fractious baby and bringing cups of tea to an idle partner and ... that takes the extra time. One more butterfly on my calendar today

I'm amazed it only takes half an hour to juggle all that in the morning - a baby seems relatively easy in comparison to a mobile toddler! Well, finished the kitchen floor - hurrah! Now can I be arsed to mop it too or is that above and beyond. I did also manage to change the racnid bedclothes yesterday, so thats nice.

eyeballs - how is that dining room table looking?

I don't know if you saw on the other thread but I added the only housekeeping tip that I have, which is

"buy storage solutions approriate to your needs"

One of the reasons hotpost and clutter magnet places arise is because there isn't an easy or obvious place to put the things that are there - things can sometimes help:

an intray for post can help with general daily clutter (unfortunately mine is in the wrong place - upstairs, so mail just gets filed on the 3rd 4th 5th and 6th steps!)

Sometimes a keyrack helps?

and somewhere for gloves and hats that is close to where you come in.

Magazine racks stop tables becoming filing systems for last weeks newspapers.

DH refuses to get a coat rack because he doesn't see why we cant just go upstairs and put our jackets in the cupboard in the bedroom. S'not going to happen is it. Anyone recommend a nice coat rack?

Hey all. My new habit is going to be putting away clean clothes as soon as they're dry, rather than putting them in a laundry basket/piling them up somewhere in bedroom and leaving them there for weeks days...

well i didnt manage to do a wash the day i said i would but i did two yesterday and one today and have all the rest of the washing separated ready to go in tomorrow and the following day.

Hey all! I am going to take something with me every time I go upstairs, to reduce downstairs clutter (what happens to it when it is upstairs is a different matter!). This is my vow.

My dining table has a few bits on it as I have just come in (my bag, DD's bag and a Tesco carrier) but that's all. I have cleared it every night, cleared the kitchen and today I bought two more airers so that I can do one load of washing a day until the backlog is cleared. Lack of hanging space was stopping me before.

I need to look at clothes storage as we have a severe lack of hanging and drawer space.

And my organised mum planner and magnetic shopping list thingy arrived today

I'm loving being a teeny tiny bit organised

ooh where does the mum planner come from?

[doh![http://www.organised-mum.co.uk/]] google is my friend....

oh so that is what magazine racks are for! I genuinely never really understood them before! realise we need one of them now ...

did clothes again last night, me and dd are now dressed and ds' clothes are now with us downstairs to put on in front of TV, thereby avoiding tantrums and freeing up bathroom for dp. This stuff works!!

Can I join in too?

Housework just leaves me absolutely desperate. I am truly rubbish at it. It's not just that I hate it, but I am so inefficient as well, so I seem to spend my whole life doing something I despise, or making excuses not to.

I actually nearly cried today looking at all the clothes to be put away and all the new ones to wash (I don't iron), so my new habit is going to be the same as MrsMattie's, I will put away clean clothes as soon as they're dry for 21 days.

I am opting for a sticker chart too, which I will reinstate at the same time as DD's potty training sticker chart that I have also been neglecting.

[bad mummy/good mummy emoticon]

Welcome Laugs! It is so comforting to know other people feel the same way about this sort of thing!

No sticker for me yesterday; kids went to bed late and instead of doing sink (established habit) and clothes (current One New Habit) I opened a bottle of wine and curled up on the sofa with dp to watch Red Riding. However I could have done the clothes earlier on in the day as I was here all afternoon .... no guilt allowed but I think it will work better if I think of this as an 'as soon as I can' habit rather than an 'end of the day' habit.

clean the kitchen before going to sleep.

Failed again to get clothes ready yesterday, after a string of domestic disasters that left me at one point standing in the yard trying to empty out a bean bag covered in cat wee in a wind storm while my potty-training two year old pooed on the floor in the living room, just as my poo-phobic dp arrived home after his worst day at work ever to find complete chaos at home. I leave the resulting picture to your respective imaginations but it wasn't good. After that I only had energy for the absolute bare minimum. I have a PhD for God's sake, why am I so crap at this practical domestic stuff??? argh.

but I have been doing better at keeping picking things up, and today is another day....

systemsaddict, I have a potty-training 2 year old as well. It definitely does nothing for my aspirations of domestic harmony.

Having said that, I decided on Friday that my new habit would be to put away clean clothes, yet I still haven't washed any yet to put away, so I only have myself to blame...

lol systems i have a phd too - just goes to show that letters after our names are meaningless wen it comes to the important things in life like clean knickers in the morning anbd dust-free floors! (one thing i am realising with a great deal of embarrassment as i slowly get better at housework is hw revolting nmy place was before

i slipped up on saturday hoovering but did double extra to make up yesterday so feel i am back on track.

been trying to do the quick wipe round the bathroom every day too which is kind of working but twinkle pooed in the bath this morning so that will force a proper clean

Just seen this thread. I'm going to try put all the cleans clothes away straight away without leaving them on a chair for a week till the pile falls over.

If I can achieve this perhaps I can add to the list next week.

sausage we are living parallel lives, clearly, as my 2 year old completed the disastrous day on Saturday pooing in the bath too! I was just drying the baby and heard him saying thoughtfully to himself 'What a lot of poos' - this was just too much for my already-overstretched partner ... what a day!

Congrats on the hoovering and remember on being embarrassed about how it was before, there is no guilt allowed on this thread - housework is a practical issue, not a moral one. (Though I know exactly how you feel ...)

And ... I got clothes ready last night! which did make this morning much much better happy with self

and welcome paranoidmother! I am hoping one day to graduate from 'getting one outfit out the night before' to 'actually putting the clothes away' but for now that's a bit advanced for me

oh an outfit the night before I must think about that, it'll only be once the pile of clothes has disappeared.

Well- a week later- the dining table is clear!!! (though only since saturday )
Will try to keep it so all week...

Please can i join? I am struggling to get out of the disorganised habits of a lifetime. Hard to pick just one, but my first one is doing one load of washing per day, on at night, out in the motning and put away as soon as it's dried. A lot of other things would be okay if it weren't for the washing.

My three easy habits are: always take a load of washing downstairs first thing in morning, (even before a cup of coffee or getting dressed). It will be done when you return from dropping kids at school.

2nd habit, sorting all recycling directly into outside recycling bins twice a day rather than a hideous sort once a week as the van approaches and I'm in my nightie.

did it, got all our clothes out last night, and did it without having to plan / think / resist beforehand so think the force of the habit is slowly setting in. Weirdly, many other things in my house are coming together too; hope this continues.

I had a vague feeling there was an Aristotle quote about the force of habit so just googled it:

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."