Keep your kitchen clean challenge

Today marks the fifth day of the Keep Your Kitchen Clean Challenge in the Robinson household and I am happy to report that I have not yet gone to bed this week with a dirty kitchen! We all know that I am a self-proclaimed, horrible housekeeper. Does this mean that I am a hoarder with 75 cats living in my house and so much garbage and clutter lying around that I don't know if the cats are alive or dead? No. It does mean, though, that I don't clean as often as I should and am really bad at picking up after myself. It also means that unexpected guests and visitors put me into a complete panic that could someday cause me to have an anxiety attack. For these reasons and the simple fact that I, too, would like to come home from work to a clean house where I can completely relax (yes, I am capable of relaxing).

So, after speaking to many of the cleanest people I know, and asking about their habits and strategies, I learned that one of the best ways to keep your house clean and tidy is to simply clean up your messes before moving on to make another one. Isn't this what we teach toddlers? To first clean up their messes before they're allowed to do anything else? Either I never mastered that skill (no comments from the parents here) or I completely lost it somewhere along the line.

On Saturday night, our friends Jen and Sean came over to play some games after we went out for Pat's birthday. It was an impromptu gathering and even though Jen is one of my closest friends, she is also the neatest person I know so I was mortified by my messy house, most of all, my kitchen sink full of dirty dishes. The next day, I spent hours cleaning the kitchen until it was spotless (except the floors which still need mopped - hey, Rome wasn't built in a day). At that moment, I vowed to not let it get that messy again - the same vow I make every time I clean, except this time, I meant it.

I am a creature of habit. So when I get into "routines," I am usually pretty good at sticking with them. So here are the new routines I'm trying to make: While I'm cooking dinner, I wash the dishes as I go. When we are done with dinner, we load the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. I got rid of the drying rack to give me more counter space and to force me to dry and put away dishes as I wash them. And finally, I check the sink before I go to bed to make sure there are no dirty dishes in it.

Five days of a clean kitchen might not sound like a lot, but I am comfortable with baby steps. Until I tackle cleaning routines for the rest of the house, however, my unexpected guests are restricted to staying in the kitchen. :)

Does anyone else share some of these struggles with me?