I didn’t realize that I’ve missed two weeks of posting here this month, and I apologize for dropping the ball. I got so busy with the house, it didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t post! But I have a good reason, and I think you’ll understand why I’ve been MIA for the last couple of weeks, once I explain it to you.

TRIGGER ALERT: This post contains photos of my house in the worst state it’s ever been, and it isn’t pretty. There isn’t anything gross like dog poop on the floor, or moldy, rotting food. It’s mostly clutter. EVERYWHERE.

Back when I first retired in December 2025, I think I posted that my first priority was getting the house straightened out. We moved into this house in December 2021, and we never really got the house set up correctly because we were just too busy to get it done right. I thought I could get it back under control in short order. Boy was I wrong.

One thing I need to point out here is that my retirement plan was to quilt, sew, and craft while maintaining the household. I was really looking forward to it, but I was completely unprepared for the reality. I do not treat my creative endeavors as “rewards” for doing housework, and I know there are many people who have zero issue with dishes piled in the sink or a dusty house when they’re in their crafting element, but sadly, I am not one of those people. The house doesn’t need to be perfect, but clutter “shouts” at me. I know it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but I can’t spend time crafting or quilting when the house looks like this.

What I found over the last eight months (WOW! Have I really been retired for nearly EIGHT MONTHS?!?), is that I’ve never had a good cleaning foundation. I didn’t realize until probably April or May of this year that my biggest issue wasn’t cleaning the house; it was reducing the clutter in the house. Once I had that epiphany, making progress became a lot easier. I’ve tried FlyLady and other “cleaning systems” but I never seemed to make progress trying to follow them. I’d like to think it’s because I have some special reasons why everyone else’s system doesn’t work, but I think it’s more about not wanting to follow a regimen that doesn’t fit my life.

I bought the book Sidetracked Home Executives: From Pigpen to Paradise by Pam Young and Peggy Jones last year, but I didn’t read it until earlier this year. I knew that the FlyLady system was based on this book, but when I read it, I realized that the one thing missing from FlyLady was personalization. I was never going to be successful in my own home if I kept trying to follow someone else’s list of rooms to clean and the order I wanted to tackle them, so I decided to try setting up a program that reflects my own needs, and so far, it’s working very well.

Eventually, I realized that I’d spent several months sitting in the dark, trying to come to grips with no longer working, and not making any progress in the house. I was completely overwhelmed every time I considered trying to tackle the piles and clutter stacked everywhere, and I was seriously becoming worried that there was something wrong with my mental health that was keeping me from fixing the issues with the house. We took a trip to Seattle that month, and I spent the entire week we were there taking photos around the city. Obviously, I didn’t think about the state of the house once during the trip, and it relieved the pressure valve that the house had created. I had so much fun, but then I had to go back home to the mess.

Then, the last morning of Chris’s vacation, I woke up and thought, I have to do something today to improve the house, even if I only work on it for a few minutes. And then I opened my eyes and saw the massive piles of clothing at the end of the bed, and thought, maybe I should just go back to sleep. This is so embarrassing to share, but I feel like you can’t really appreciate my mental state without seeing it.

But I didn’t go back to sleep. I got up, left the room and closed the door on the bedroom so I didn’t have to look at it or think about it.

But the living room wasn’t any better. There were piles of items from my quilt studio that I was trying to “fix,” taking over the living room, so I walked into the kitchen, where the counters were strewn with small kitchen appliances, cookbooks, and dishes that needed to be washed. My office was full of unopened Amazon boxes, and piles of mail. The studio was in a weird transitional state that I couldn’t describe even if I tried.

In short, the house was a mess. I had to do something, and I needed to get started immediately. I sat down and came up with a loose plan. I’d start in the bedroom, and work for a week in there, doing whatever I could without killing myself. It’s the same zone cleaning schedule concept that other systems use, but personalized to me and our house. I was having issues with my heel/ankle tendons, and I couldn’t push myself too much, so I grabbed some trash bags and my phone, and went into the bedroom with the idea of spending 15 minutes on the pile at the end of the bed, and surprisingly, that’s exactly what I did. I spent 15 minutes working on that pile, and found that I was actually making progress.

I. Was. Shocked.

I wish that was a joke, but it is not. I sat down and rested for a few minutes, because 15 minutes of digging through a massive pile of clothing isn’t as easy as it sounds. And then I went back after catching my breath, to do another 15 minutes on the pile. I continued doing that until I’d put in an hour that first day. I wish I could say the pile was gone at the end of that hour, but it wasn’t even close.

I spent the entire week devoting 15 minutes at a time to working through the pile at the end of the bed and other areas of the room, and at the end of the week, I had a much smaller pile of clothing, but it wasn’t completely gone. I had also made time to clear my nightstand and the top of a Kallax 4×2 that I was using for storage. During that week, I started to make the bed every day, which felt a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig, but I kept going. At the end of the week, it was much better, but there were still piles sitting around. At this point, my plan wasn’t to get rid of a bunch of stuff, it was just to get like items in one place – shirts hung in the closet, shoes stored together, books in one place, etc. I wasn’t looking for perfection, just progress, and I had definitely found progress.

The next week, I moved on to the kitchen. The week after that, I hit my office. Each week, I hit one room, spent at least an hour a day in that week’s zone, working to declutter, and doing “maintenance” tasks such as vacuuming, dusting, and other “regular” cleaning tasks. I didn’t “finish” the entire room by the end of the week, but I continued to make progress, every day.

I was also working on daily and weekly resets around the house so I didn’t lose progress in rooms I’d already worked in. I continued to make my bed every day, load and unload the dishwasher, wipe down kitchen counters and the sink areas in the bathrooms every few days, etc. Every week when I finished a room, I made sure I left it in better condition than it was when I started. It look six weeks to make it all the way through the house once. The house was definitely looking better, but I didn’t “finish” a room during that first cycle. Then I started over again with the bedroom.

There are a few things I’ve learned in the last few weeks that are invaluable. The first thing is, most of the issues I was dealing with weren’t cleaning related. They were CLUTTER related. My house, believe it or not, isn’t actually dirty, and it wasn’t dirty before I started this endeavor. It was badly cluttered, though, which makes cleaning very difficult and it takes MUCH longer to clean when you’re moving piles all over the place.

The second thing I learned is, there is no such thing as “finished” when it comes to cleaning. In the past, I would clean a room and think that it was done. I guess I expected it to just stay that way, and of course, it never does. You have to build in regular maintenance routines to keep the room from going to seed again, which is one thing I never really considered.

The third thing I learned is that clutter unmanaged is clutter that never goes away. When something no longer fulfilled whatever need or plan we had for it, we didn’t discard it, we held on to it. I found four sets of measuring cups and three sets of measuring spoons in the kitchen during the second zone cleaning cycle, which was absolutely ridiculous. I decluttered quite a bit on the last pass through the kitchen, and I can declutter still more during the next cycle. I don’t know if Goodwill loves me, or hates me, but by the end of it, they’re going to have VERY strong opinions about me.

I also learned that the furniture and storage “solutions” we had weren’t really working for us. Chris had a system of laundry baskets that he used to store clothes, which drove me crazy, but we didn’t have any furniture he could use for that purpose. We also had a massive sleigh bed that didn’t work in the room, and a desk that wasn’t being used, so last cycle through the bedroom, we decided to replace the bedroom suite.

We also replaced living room furniture, which I will share soon.

Getting the clutter out of the way allowed me to see that the furniture was working against us, and was making a bad situation worse. The sleigh bed sat about a foot further into the room than the new bed, so replacing it, even with the bench at the end, takes up less room than the sleigh bed did.

But the main thing I’ve learned through all of this is that clutter is the real enemy of a clean house. We still have a LOT of clutter in the house, but now it’s much more manageable, and we’re working to get things out of the house, which in turn, will make it easier to clean the house.

I converted my office into a craft room, and the difference is dramatic. The office had become a dumping ground for Amazon deliveries, things destined for Goodwill, and mail.

Now, the same room is a fun workspace to make things. This room can support a wide variety of crafts – scrapbooking, card making, beading, cross stitch, jewelry making, crochet … I set it up specifically to support everything but quilting, sewing and machine embroidery. I have the studio for those.

My zone cleaning system works for me because I personalized it. I no longer have small children, or children at home. But I have a quilting studio and now, a craft room, which is never a consideration in other peoples’ systems, nor should it be; everyone should be customizing their cleaning schedule and system to their specific needs. It’s hard to follow someone else’s systems when their context doesn’t really apply to your own space, as I found out.

So, tell me – do you follow a cleaning system, or does cleaning come naturally for you? Let me know in the comments, and feel free to share your favorite decluttering tips!