January is typically the time of year for organizing, and I find in our home we too seize the slower pace and frigid temperatures to tackle a few projects that have been on the backburner. Over the last few weeks, both Alex and I have both begun commenting to each other just how jam packed our closets feel, how disorganized our cabinets have become, and how generally we can’t find what we’re looking for. (Well, more so my other half on this one, but then again, he can’t find his way out of our disorganized basement.)

Take our kitchen cabinets, for example. It’s a lucky day if we open the cabinets without a shower of cupcake wrappers or canned goods taking a leap of faith. 

We just cross our fingers it’s the former. Canned goods showering down on you as well as the countertops and floor is never a good time.

Today I decided I’ve had it, and I need to get started on a mission to organize. Room by room, beginning with the kitchen, I’m going to clean out the drawers, cabinets, and closets in our home, donating what someone else can use, throwing away broken or damaged items, and reorganizing what we have. I’ve also decided I’m going to do so without spending a single cent. This won’t be one of those max-out-your-credit-card-at-the-Container-Store efforts, nor will it be an impractical effort of making every drawer look beautiful with matching hand calligraphied labels, all carefully organized in salvaged baby food jars. I’m setting out to use what we have, get rid of what we don’t need, maximize the way we use the space in our 15’ wide home, and to restore the delicate balance that is my sanity.

In fact, I’m challenging myself to undertake and complete this effort in the next two weeks. So who’s with me? We can make it a Clean and Purge Challenge. I’ll report back on my progress with before and afters, and if you’d like to share your progress for inclusion in a future post, please send it to me at wendy@oldtownhome.com. I’d love to know I’m not the only one knee deep in torn gift-wrap bags and stale Halloween marshmallows. 

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It's hard to concentrate on other things right now, so we hope our blog post might provide a moment or two of a departure from the events in Boston.

Man oh man, do we have a crazy long to do list in front of us this week. If you read yesterday's post about our recent curb appeal efforts, you know that we realized we had signed up to host a neighborhood party this month. With little time to spare, we took stock of what we needed to accomplish this week before 40 or so people descend on the house. 

So where are we, exactly, in our to do list? Here's a quick recap of where we stand. Before Friday's event, we need to:

• Trim the topiaries and plant flowers in the front urns
• Plant flowers in the front bed, and mulch the area
• Clean the front steps and vestibule
• Rake up the sticks and debris along the side of the house
• Clean out the beds in the back yard
• Plants herbs
• Plant the vegetable garden
• Clean and oil the outdoor furniture
• Clean the house
• Oil the kitchen counters
• Replace the Christmas carol artwork in the sun porch with something less seasonal
• Purchase wine, cups, and other party items
• Set up an outdoor buffet for the party

Tonight we decided to tackle item number four on the list. Although not a top priority, the area on either side of our alley wall was in desperate need of a little TLC. On the alley side, general debris had collected over the last several months, to include sticks, leaves, trash, and a few indications that we have inconsiderate pet owners that walk our alley. (I'll spare you photographic evidence of the last item.) Here's a look at what we were starting with.

Sure, it wasn't horrible, but it needed a bit of a spruce up. I got to work, quickly raking the base of the wall, pulling old leaves and general junk from the roots of the ivy. I raked the debris into several small piles, and Alex got to work bagging. 

Meanwhile I spent a few minutes pulling up clumps of weeds that were growing alongside the front of our house. 

After only 20 or so minutes, the area was substantially improved. It's a subtle difference in the photos, but in person it seems more apparent that our home is inhabited by people who weren't raised by wolves.

On a bit of a side note, what we have now is 1,000 times better than what we had when we moved in. Years of neglect left the ivy struggling to survive. Now that we've worked on it for 10 years,  trimming and training the ivy along the way, the old images are both shocking and a distant memory.

The next step involved the narrow alley on the inside of our wall. This tight and rather dysfunctional space unfortunately serves as a catch all for yard tools, broken pots, the sky pencils that used to reside in our front urns, half used bags of soil, and other miscellaneous junk. It's a total eyesore, and unfortunately we've yet to crack how to properly organize this narrow space. (Perhaps a little shed build-out is in Alex's future?)

Nevertheless, a cleanup was in order, so I first got to work trimming back the long strands of ivy.

Meanwhile Alex began identifying items for the trash, as well as organizing the items that were staying. Is hiding junk behind the air conditioner really a solution, especially when it's in plain view from the dining room window? Definitely not, but it will have to do for now.

Even Lulu looked at us disapprovingly for that move.

Once we had the majority of the junk cleaned up neatly tucked behind the air conditioner, we swept up the yard waste and neatly wound up the long garden hose.

All in all, the area isn't "organized" by any stretch of the imagination, but it's greatly improved from the hot mess that it was just a few hours ago.

It's all part of a good spring cleaning, and I'm still grateful for the self imposed deadline that's forcing us to tackle the yard work in a timely manner this year. 

Do you have areas of your home that you tend to ignore? Maybe a space that seems totally unusable? Do you have any ideas on how we can better organize this area? We'd love to hear your ideas.

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Her face may not be green and she doesn't live in a cave, but her grinchy ways come out when cleanliness she does crave.

Opposite from the grinch that we all love and know, her heart doesn't start out needing to grow.

Her heart already swells three sizes each holiday season, but the trees and presents and glitter all wear on her for some reason.

As the holiday stretches and we see Baby New Year, I begrudgingly agree to what has become entirely clear.

Though all the Who's down in Whoville might be singing their song...

Fah who foraze! Dah who doraze!
Welcome Christmas, come this way!

...the excess and obstacles all begin to feel just so wrong.

Our first step in packing involves staging the gear, gathering all of our bobbles the first weekend of the New Year.

It's an agreement in our house and one of our clearly stated rules, if we leave Christmas up too long we look like two fools.

Day two brings more reduction and removal of our trinkets, placing them all atop our guest bedroom's blankets.

On the final day of the purge we reach a true fevered pitch, and I'd be lying if I said that the Grinch didn't once bitch!

We climb into the attic to pull down our buckets, boxes, and bags, and begin organizing and sorting and packing our Who swags.

It begins with piles of cheer all over the house, and ends with a flurry of activity I'd like to see more often from my spouse.

We remove ornaments and garland and lights from the tree, and we take down all of the bows and the wreaths that we see.

The nutcrackers that like to crack nuts in here heads, are wrapped in their wrapping and placed in their box beds.

But before I know it that's when IT happens to me, but what IT is I'm not entirely sure, you see?

Among all of the piles of holiday glee, something catches my eye over next to the tree.

A little red barn with animals at play on the ground, and the lights of the tree twinkling all around. 

"Maybe, just today, we'll leave it all in place, we'll leave it tomorrow, and maybe the next day, just in case..."

...What if we don't actually want Christmas to go away? What if this Christmas was always meant to stay? We can keep the tree with its lights all a glow, we can keep the Santas and reindeers and bows.

All of this organizing and packing can be such a chore, we'd rather watch Downton Abbey, it's far less of a bore.

"No!" Yells the Grinch, "I must stick to my plan, it must all go away as fast as it can!"

"I can't stand the thought of it around one more day! If this Christmas hangs around any longer you'll surely pay!" 

The thing that I hate is the Grinch is right all along, if only the end of the season could be signalled with a gong.

We've had a great time with all our family and pets, but now that it's January it's time life resets!

We plug right along from morning 'til night, shuffling and packing it all out of sight. The boxes are filled with all of the cheer, safely packed away for another great year.

As we prepare to rid our home of our trees, we begin to buckle and shake at the knees. Oh the mess of the the trees! The trees, trees, trees, trees!

The trees drop their needles all over the floor, you can see the messy trail that's left when we head to the door!

The curb of the street is where we drop our old tree, then the city comes along to collect them for free. They take them away in the back of a truck, to the chipper and grinder to be turned into muck.

Back in our house the mess migrates from downstairs to up, we stage and organize with little help from our pup.

Though our eyes grow weary and we just want a break, we know there's no rest while there's still boxes to take.

It's true that the mess is what the Grinch truly does hate, but after hours of effort it finally starts to look great. We may still have bows in random house places, but they've been largely removed from most of our spaces.

The attic is where our Christmas boxes will stay, waiting to be displayed in just 329...plus one more day.

At the end of the effort our home feels oh so bare, and that's when I realize what's behind Christmas cheer. Our Christmas spirit comes in with a rush in November, but it must leave just as fast or it can be an overwhelming crush to remember.

The key to the Grinch's eagerness to do it again in a year, is balanced with her terror of appearing on Hoarders, a true fear! 

As you can see from my grinchy tale from above, Christmas has a time and place for my Grinch's love. But as the season lingers and stretches to January, we must resolve the issues before she feels far too weary.

With all of our boxes stowed at the end of the day, we can resume our house projects with nothing in our way.

We hope you've enjoyed our tale of Wendy Grinch today, she doesn't come around often, but if you see her be sure to stay out of her way!

Do you have a need or compulsion to clean your holiday clutter as we do? Perhaps the Grinch's hoarding fear also afflicts you? 

Please share your methods and practices that you use to cope, this way my Grinch will feel like far less of a dope.

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The morning started normally, but as I descended our stairs in the darkness, a scent I wasn't used to hit my nostrils. Was it the pine if the Christmas tree? Perhaps, but why all of a sudden, as the tree's been there for weeks. It wasn't until I opened the basement door to retrieve my coat from the basement stairwell/coat closet that it hit me -- the whole first floor of our house had a distinct perfume smell. It took me a minute to place the smell, and then I realized it was TIDE FEBREZE SCENTED DETERGENT!!!!

Uh oh. Why was the scent of our detergent of choice suddenly wafting throughout our house? It smelled lovely, but I knew something was amiss. Remembering that I had run a load of laundry just before going to bed, I nervously walked down our basement stairs, wondering what I would see. I had visions of a flooded basement dancing in my head. But when I got down there, this is the disaster that lay before me.

It looked like the murder scene of an unsuspecting smurf. It seems that our washing machine was possibly off balance during the spin cycle and rocked the super sized and nearly full bottle of 96 load Tide HE detergent off of the top of the machine and it had fallen to the floor. If you're calculating at home, that's like $15 in wasted liquid soap.

Not only had it fallen, but it had landed on the upper plastic cap and burst open, flooding the basement with the thick sludge of blue soapy freshness. When the bottle hit the ground, the lid cracked and the contents blew up all over the floor.

A nearby pile of wood, an innocent bystander in the ordeal, looked like it was the victim of a crime. Someone call Dexter, because we need a spatter expert to reconstruct the crime and determine just how this wood hoard met its fate.

I had to head to work and couldn't deal with it in the morning, so I put off cleaning the mess until the evening. You know, the evening this week I had earmarked to be super productive and work through my checklist of projects.

When I arrived home later in the day, I had forgotten about the looming chore, but when I opened the back door to the house I was rudely reminded when the smell of a cool summer's breeze smacked me in the olfactory senses.

After screwing around on Twitter for a good two hours, I put my procrastination aside and got to cleaning. Before actually trying to mop up the soap, I first had to clean the mess I had in the basement on top of the spill. We are mid-project down there, so what do you want from me?

After all of my tools were put away and the space cleared, I kicked off my efforts with a wad of paper towels. I didn't have high hopes for this approach, and the hopes I had were quickly dashed. It seemed the paper towels just spread the sludge around.

I knew I needed a better way to clean up the mess, but how? As I thought about how to clean, I figured I might as well try to salvage as much of the liquid as I could. I started scooping the blue goo from the center and pouring it back into the container.

I felt a little like a weirdo doing this, but I figured it was okay if a little dirt got into the container. I mean, it's soap...right?

I was able to reduce the puddle of freshly scented sludge in the middle of the basement by a pretty substantial amount. And once I was done with that piece of the cleanup, I needed to find a good way to get the rest up and off of the floor.

As I looked around our basement for some material to clean the oozing slop I didn't see many things that would work. I was thinking about heading out to the store when my eyes landed on a bag of cat litter.

Though the litter wasn't the clumping kind, it was still worth a shot. I tore open the bag and spread some of it on the detergent as a test. After allowing it to sit for a few minutes to absorb the liquid, I wiped the litter around and evaluated its effectiveness as a detergent cleaning solution.

IT WAS WORKING! The litter had absorbed enough that the floor was no longer blue. 

I dumped out a a bigger pile of cat litter and began spreading it around with my hands.

Note: If this ever happens to you, put on gloves! I got some of the detergent on the back of my hands and it started burning after a few minutes.

I slowly worked the litter toward the middle drain, wiping and cleaning as I went. After about 20 minutes the floor was looking much better, and we just had a giant pile of litter in the middle of the floor.

To clean this pile I used our shop vac, but not just our Shop Vac. 

I knew the detergent and cat litter would fill the vacuum too quickly. To remedy this, I used our dust collection bucket so the litter would settle there rather than in the vacuum.

Once I had the majority of the litter picked up, I had to clean the remainder of the film left by the soap. I first tried water but that was simply making suds and leaving a slick mess. I changed course and tried using some distilled white vinegar, because vinegar solves everything.

After pouring it on the floor I used handfuls of paper towels to wipe up the mess. After about two hours and two rolls of paper towels, the basement was finally clean...err...at least free of soap. I can see the outline of where the detergent settled as the floor is extremely clean in those areas, but it's not like the floor is in good shape, so I'm okay with that.

Finally clean, our basement is as fresh smelling as it's ever been, but I could have done without the wasted evening. But if this ever has to happen again, there are a few things we're going to need to add to our shopping list. Primarily, I wish we had clumping litter and a mop in the house, but I think I did alright with what we had on hand. Though the evening ended up being more or less shot from a project standpoint, I learned a few valuable lessons.

1. Stop putting stuff on the top of the washing machine that might cause a problem if it falls.
2. Cat litter and vinegar can solve many problems.
3. Twitter can be totally funny and awesome and is often a great way to procrastinate.
4. Always keep a massive supply of paper towels in the house, as you never know when you'll need them.

Have you ever had a disaster related to laundry detergent? How about a similar disaster that derailed your otherwise productive evening plans? Let me know what problems have taken your night by surprise so I can feel better about a waste of my evening.

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There are so many different and (arguably) useful ways you can make efficient use of the extra hour you've cheated out of the day. Some like to sleep through it, others prefer to watch an extra hour of television, while others take the opportunity to start a new project or craft. Heck, I've even heard someone say "I think I'll start to learn a new language." I'm not sure how far you can get in picking up a new alphabet in an hour, let along verb conjugation or vocabulary memorization, but hey, more power to them.

This year Wendy was dead set on making an efficient and effective use of our extra hour, in spite of my best efforts to sleep right through it. Quite honestly, nothing would have made me happier than to get an extra hour of zzz's this past weekend, but I have to hand it to Wendy, her ideas were far more practical and especially necessary given the items on our ever growing to-do list. So back to the big question of "how did we spend our extra hour?"

Wendy almost jumped out of bed on Sunday morning (or at least that's how I saw it when I was trying to keep my head buried under the covers), and she hit the ground running cleaning. Wendy started the day by packing up the Halloween decorations, and organizing her closet, her clothes, and pulling aside several bags of items to donate to charity. She was so inspiring (I think that's what you call it when she keeps saying "Come on, get out of bed, get a move on, stop just laying there, you've slept enough!") that I couldn't resist getting out of bed to start working on the same task. 

At the onset, it was organized chaos to say the least. My closet had gotten out of hand. Clothes were draped over the bars, other clothes piled on the floor, and my shoes hidden from view. 

Wendy's clothes in her closet were far better off than mine, but she was in the deep throws of the change over from summer to winter clothes, so there were plastic tubs of clothes all over the room and folded clothes piled up on the bed. 

That was the real reason I was "encouraged" from my slumber, as the clothes and Lulu were overtaking my sleeping area.

I started by removing everything that was ancillary from my closet and spreading it all over the room and making piles. That seemed like the most logical approach to this organization process.

My piles, combined with Wendy's piles, made super piles which made us feel like our clothes were taking over our entire room. As the oxygen felt like it was being squeezed from the room by the multiplying clothes, Lulu couldn't even feign interest in the whole task, and instead enjoyed the partially made bed.

The key to this little project was our ability to sort through all of our clothes and determine which items needed to be packed away for the winter, which needed to be taken out of storage (the areas above our closets), and which we simply didn't like or haven't worn in years and could be donated. I had my fair share of trying on shirts and then saying, "How does this look? Should I get rid of it?"

I sorted through all of my clothes and came up with quite a few that could be donated. Telltale signs that I hadn't worn something in a very long time? How about a 2008 Nationals schedule and receipt from late 2007. The receive was for lunch where I ordered a chicken sandwich. The last time I had worn this particular coat, I was still eating meat. Off to the donation pile it went.  

After digging through all of our clothes, Wendy and I compiled a pretty solid collection of clothes to donate. To be exact, we gathered up six shopping bags full of our old stuff that we'll dropping at a local charity.

Wendy packed all of her summer clothes neatly into their storage bins and we stowed them safely in the upper storage above the closet. 

Inevitably, when you clean things up and organize you run across items that make you pause and remember where you were when you picked something up. Wendy came across our Mardi-Gras masks from our 2011 trip to New Orleans, and decided to try them on for the camera. Now she wants to make sure we throw a party sometime where we can wear these masks.

I thinned out all of my clothes in the closet, hung everything where they needed to go, and got everything sorted out and put back in place in my closet. Here's my closet's "after" photo. 

In case you're observant and wondering, yes, those are all pairs of jeans hanging along the bottom bar in my closet. I'm a bit of a jeans hoarder, and this is how I can store them all. It's totally overkill and a little nuts, but there's little I do in life that isn't "totally overkill and a little nuts."

Wendy kept working on her clothes and getting everything in her closets and drawers tidy and nicely organized. Check out just how lovely and wonderful her winter sweaters looked all nestled in their beds.

Unfortunately, I'm a horrible photographer and neglected to take pictures of Wendy's cleaned closets. I was so fixated on my own closet, I became an insensitive and selfish husband and focused only on my efforts. I'll make it up Wendy and all of you on the Internet and get some photos up a little later. Until then, you can curse my name, I will understand.

All told, our extra hour in the day allowed us to knock out a necessary but often neglected task in our home. We were able to collect items for donation, clean out our closets and drawers, and determine clothes we need to purchase to round out our winter wardrobes. Perhaps I need to focus a little more on nicer clothes for work than purchasing more jeans? Just an idea I'm throwing out there.

Now we can appreciate our closets and drawers in all of their clean and pristine glory...without clothes spilling all over the place.

What sort of things did you do with your extra hour? Did you knock out any small tasks? Or perhaps you kicked off some big projects? If you had intended to do something but never got around to it, what sort of thing did you fail to get moving on?

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