Something pretty huge occurred to me the other day.  

I’ve lived on my own/with Jeremy for about 10 years.  And although I grew up with a clutter-free, neat & tidy, home, I was never a clutter-free, neat & tidy, person.  Sure, I know how to clean, de-clutter, find-a-home-for and organize with the best them.  I just never did it in my house.  I cleaned (hate real dirt), I changed sheets every couple of weeks (hate dirty sheets), I made sure there was a path through the clutter and I learned to use the 1 square foot of counter space to cook and bake.

If you followed my blog this last summer, you’ll know that I did a lot cleaning out, giving away, and organizing in preparation of putting my house on the market.  And it’s taken me 5 months for this, this revelation, to make it’s self known.

Here it is, my story.  Early last week, I wasn’t feeling good and instead of doing dishes right after breakfast, I left them on the counter.  After lunch and dinner, I did the same thing.  So by the next morning, I had this mess:

Looking back on it, I realize that I wasn’t really overwhelmed by the mess, but I wasn’t really looking forward to making it clean.  And actually, Jeremy beat me to most of the mess and I just helped him unload the dishwasher.

A couple of days later, it hit me that the reason it only took Jeremy and I ten minutes to clean up an entire day’s worth of dishes and for me to feel good about the state of the kitchen was because the counters have been kept free of clutter and the only things that needed to be tidied was the dishes and Lucy’s mess under the table.

It rocked my world.  Really.  So, I’m no longer uptight about making sure that the kitchen is cleaned immediately after I finish eating.  Such a better mindset 🙂