with a little help from www.last.fm and my fabulous music library...

'Are you pregnant?!' .....Ben's reply to my rambling on and on about my extensive cleaning/organizing/decluttering/making sense of all the unorganized organization scattered, hidden, and quite often even visibly seen throughout our house.

It started with my phone call to YMCA Advancement to donate a heaping pile (mess) of clothing, toys, and miscellaneous household items that were strewn across the makeshift shelving on the west side of the garage. After finding out everything needs to be contained in either a plastic bag or cardboard box, i began my cleaning frenzy...before i knew it, the entire garage was cleaned, organized and looking like, well -- a garage! one room down...

I decided to just suck it up and tackle the kitchen cupboards. My white cupboards that constantly need to be wiped down (not to mention having the insides wiped out regularly would do wonders as well--but i don't do it). -- Do not even think about purchasing white cupboards--unless you are OCD and love to repeatedly wipe down the fronts of your cupboards. I didn't choose these, by the way...they were a bad choice made by the owner of the house in 1991 when it was built. (Their choice of lighting fixtures throughout the house and the horrendous black and white checked kitchen flooring was just as bad of a decision..but that's a whole other blog that i'll never write--but for the record, we replaced the kitchen flooring ASAP after moving in and all the light fixtures in the kitchen have been replaced as well).

Back to the cupboards. I started with the baking cupboard shortly after 9am..which had somehow become the baking/small tools/spilled sugars/one big huge mess cupboard. No rhyme or reason whatsoever..just ask Anita, she'll tell ya.

Marnie stopped over in the midst of my project and got the luxury of helping me sort through random pills strewn about the cupboard that contains our glasses/cups/coffee mugs and medicine?!

By 2:35pm, after many sneezes and a few 'what the eff is this doing in here?' and 'oh, that's where that was!' comments to myself, i had a heaping bag of nonsense for the trash and and entire kitchen of clean cupboards with actual rhyme and reason to their order.

My next project will be the 3 storage closets..the linen closet, hall closet, and front entryway coat closet. These three doors are the ones that, if you are smart, you close your eyes and cover your head when you open them to protect yourself from falling objects -- just ask Anita, she'll tell ya.

But first, we're going to paint Brecken's room today. Well, i'm usually not allowed to paint because i suck and let my impatient personality get the best of me..so i tend to get the luxury of taping and entertaining the kids. Hey..maybe i'll just organize the closets as Ben paints -multitasking is my speciality. After that, i could move on to the storage space under the stairs....

...for the record, NO - i'm not pregnant - just simply preparing the house for another period of hibernation during the upcoming and highly unwanted South Dakota winter that is creeping up upon us all much too soon.