I know a lot of people who swear by Spring Cleaning, but around here it’s tine for our traditional School Starts in Two Weeks and Mom’s Losing It So We’re Purging and Organizing Extravaganza. (SSITWAMLISWPAOE isn’t really shorter, is it?) Every year I convince myself that this year I’ve found the secret to how to make this work and stick, and this year is no exception.

I jumped on the bandwagon with everyone else, and read my way through that Magic Tidying Up book. I started off on track with her methods for my books and clothes. She was right, pilling everything into one overwhelming looking pile and sorting it at once is a completely effective way of doing it….but then the ADD kicked in and…

watercolor painting with 3 year olds is fun.

With a whole new stack of artwork to add to my purging papers pile, I remembered –  I’m not Japanese, and I don’t actually need to transfer energy to my clothes by running my hands over them. I have way too much going on to worry about the emotional needs of my t-shirts. So I went back to my old way of room-by-room and forcing teaching my children how to do it for with me.

The were whining by the second day, and I was eye-balling the tequila bottle when my 8-year-old genius child moaned, “This takes forever. Why do we have to do so much at once?”

And just like that, this year’s organizational theme sprang into being. I’m calling it

The Zone Organizational Method

blah, blah, blah..

Here’s the thing. I split the house into bite-sized chunks and wrote it on a white board. Every morning, each of us have to pick one zone and organize it.

Everything in it has to be put away in the place that it actually belongs. Creative home-assignments for things is strictly forbidden. (After I found the 6-year-old putting my shoes away under the bathroom sink upstairs.) Once your zone and room are clean, the rest of the day belongs to you because it’s Summer and I’m not a tyrant. Every bag that they fill for either trash or donation earns them a quarter. (I have to inspect the bags. Teenagers will gleefully throw other people’s stuff away for money.)

Twelve days to go until school begins, and the house should be done within the next five. Which gives me plenty of time to research, order, receive, decide I’m wrong, return, and then order something else for this year of homeschooling. I decided in May that we were going to do things in a radically new way this year, and I’ll begin figuring that out as soon as this clutter is out of my way.

…and after two unscheduled-before-now visits to the grandparents that we haven’t managed to see all summer!

It will all work out. It always does. (In the meantime…where did those kids put the tequila? Mama needs a margarita!)

Photo credits: The pictures taken in my house are mine.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is from Amazon. Go buy it if you haven’t read it. She really does have some good ideas.

The margarita is By Jon Sullivan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons but I’m making one tonight.