July 2013: Cleaning the House, July 11, 2013

Hmph.  I can't get my pictures off my phone, so hopefully they'll decide to venture the interwebs and I'll get them on this post.  In the meantime, tonight I decided to tackle my dresser.  This is somewhat of a problem for me, because I have two cats who will jump on flat empty surfaces, so cleaning off the dresser will turn it into a flat, empty surface.  I leave a number of things on it--like body spray and my lint rollers (I do have cats!), so there's hopefully enough to keep those two off the dresser.  Probably.  Because I have one cat who will go where he wants.  He will happily test gravity with anything in his way.  If the dresser is piled full of stuff?  That's okay with him.  He'll just jump on top of it.

There were a fair number of things piled on my dresser for a lack of a better place to put it, and those have been removed.  For example my blood pressure machine.  I don't quite know where to put it, but I do know that my dresser is not where it should be.  I'm still working on where I should put it.  However, I did find four of the sock things my sister-in-law gave me.  I like to pin my socks together because I loathe matching socks, and yet I'm obsessive of about matching socks.  And there is a right sock and a left sock, and they should never be on the wrong feet.  Pins will eventually create holes in the socks in the washer (plus, people tend to be weirded out seeing a safety pin in a sock when you're wearing them.  These sock mate things seemed like the perfect solution.  Except it was one extra step.  A long time ago I read a blog post by Ramit Sethi (he of "I Will Teach You to be Rich" fame) wherein he talked about barriers.  Those sock things...I'd take socks out of the drawer and put the sock thing on my dresser.  Later in the day, when I took my socks off, I wouldn't necessarily be right next to my dresser, so the socks would end up laying somewhere, and if this happened two days in a row suddenly I'd have four socks, and it would be hard to tell which ones were mates, and it bothered me.  With the safety pins in the sock, it was easy enough when I took my socks off to pin them together and throw them in the hamper.  It might seem like a small thing, but it was really hard for me to do.  Barriers are like that--little things that most people say "Really?  That's what's stopping you?  How incredibly lazy can you get?"  (With me, the answer to that is "unimaginably lazy.")  So, anyway, there were also safety pins littering my dresser.  (By the way, this really only applies to plain black socks and plain white socks.  If they're cute socks, I don't need to pin them.  It's pretty easy to figure out who are mates.)

Oh, I also forgot to mention workout clothes piled there.  I didn't quite know where to put them, but eventually I realized I could put them in an empty cubby under my bed.  The problem is--and was evidenced by my warmer clothes being in one of them--that my cats like to sleep on clothes there.  This isn't a huge problem except they like to move the clothes around so they're more comfortable.  I need to make boxes to put the clothes in, which will defeat the purpose of not having drawers.  Win some, lose some.

And here's after.  That water glass is important.  The cats' water dish is under my dresser, and I can refill it quickly through having a water bottle on my dresser.  There's no other place to put it really, without creating more work than just leaving it there.  I'm not tryign to make something beautiful of my dresser.  I'm focusing on functional for my life.