Week 13- HTCI Home Base Zone done!

Well, today (Saturday) is the official calendar based first day of week 13 of 2011. My main focus goal for this week is still on working through the HTCI book. I do have progress to report! It may have taken me all week, but I cleaned out my HBZ (home base zone- hereafter referred to as "HBZ").

My HBZ is the living room. In the book the three examples she gives of HBZs are 1) the kitchen sink, 2) the upstairs bathroom 3) under the master bedroom bed and the floor of the closets in the master bedroom. I really wish I had taken before pictures. I sure had a cluttered, messy living room at the beginning of week 12. But has it ever been transformed! Let me give you a guided tour:

This wall is where I started. Not too much was cluttered over here- a few things on the trunk, but it wasn't to bad:

Working clockwise we come to the piano. She talks about how easy it is to set things on anything with a horizontal surface- the piano was no exception.

She suggested hanging signs so that you don't feel badly when people come over and find your house torn apart as you are working through cleaning and organizing:

The rest of the wall:

DJ's toys aren't quite as neat as I'd like- I'm hoping to get one of those toy trunks eventually- something with a lid that we can close and have completely out of sight. The wires for the TV need some work too... but that's more David's department. We need to brainstorm together to find a solution for those.

The fireplace wall. I rearranged the pictures on top of the mantle- I painted them with the idea that they would get switched around every so often. I particularly like the way they look now!

Couch wall:

My knitting. This was the biggest source of clutter. I took a huge bag of yarn and fiber upstairs, and left only my project back sitting in my Janet basket, along with all my interchangeable needles and a stack of patterns.

One more picture and we're back where we started!

See- there isn't even anything hiding behind the couch!

And the floor is even clear of everything but DJ's play mats:

How I got here:
1) moved everything out of the room that didn't belong.
2) moved everything off of each wall, and dusted the wall from floor to ceiling, one wall at a time. I put things back as I finished a wall.
3) Moved everything off each piece of furniture- dusted all the objects and the furniture, then put everything back.
4) Moved all the furniture and vacuumed the whole floor.
5) Put the room back together.

I'm really happy with the result! The plan is to keep this room tidy and clean as I work through the rest of the house. If something has to give as far as house cleaning, that something won't be this room. I really do feel better with this one room clean.

This week's goal: continue with the HTCI book and exercise 5 days a week.  We'll see how far I can get this week with the HTCI: up next is a prayer walk through the house, photographing everything how it is right now, evaluating the house, set up a devotional station, and then start working through the house room by room.

I leave you with one last picture of our family, taken at David's Grandma Ortiz's funeral.

Week 11/12

Hah.

I attempted to start this bog post at the beginning of last week, but I never had the time to finish it. Yikes!

For the record:
Week 10's goal: To bed by 11:00 and menu plan. I modified my bed time to 12:00, mostly cause it fits better with David's schedule... I made a menu plan, but I'm still struggling with that one.

Week 11's goal: (This last week) I focused both on having devotions first thing in the morning (This was my first goal when I started at the beginning of the year, but I haven't been taking the time for it lately, and so that meant that it was back on the table for being worked on again.) and working out 5-6 times a week. I think I only missed one day of Devotions this week, which was good, and I put in two formal work outs, with "running up and down the stairs a million times today" counting for aerobic training once, and "winding 2,000+ yards of yarn on the re-skeiner" counting as strength training once... for a total of 4ish workouts- it could have gone better.

This coming week, Week 12, my plan is to do spring cleaning. The last time my parents were here, my mom bought me a book called "The House That Cleans Itself". The big idea behind the book is changing the house to fit the behavior, rather than changing the behavior when it comes to cleaning. I'm reading it today, and I plan to start working through it over the next 2- 4 weeks as my main focus. While I'm working through that, I'll be going back and revisiting some of my old goals to make sure I'm still on top of them- like working out, devos, drinking tea (I didn't at all last week cause I was so busy and didn't have the time, and boy, did I ever miss my cuppa tea!)  and wake up/bed time etc. I'm excited.

I'll try to keep you updated with how this deep cleaning/streamlining of my house goes. To give you a little taste of how the book is set up let me share with you how the author Mindy has you CONVERT a room into the HTCI system:
C-clear out the clutter
O- open up and clean
N-neaten, organize, and solve problem spots
V- verify and set up Stations as needed
E-examine Sight Zones
R record future improvements needed
T take steps now for ongoing maintenance

So far I've read up to the "V" chapter. It's the most unique book on organization/cleaning systems that I've read. Not like there have been that many that I have read.... She talks about the different personalities of people who clutter and have disorganized lives, and how different reasons for clutter need to be approached in different ways.  She also talked about Home base zones (that one place in the house that if you've got it clean/clutter free you feel peace even if the rest of the house is a disaster) and setting up a devotion "station" with your bible, journal, pen, devotional books etc before you jump into working through cleaning out the rest of the house. I'm pretty excited! I'd like to finish reading the book tonight so that I can start working through it tomorrow morning.

Rather than leave you with a picture of DJ- here is a link to videos from the Church services at Trinity. By tomorrow afternoon (Monday, March 21st) the video from today should be up. Trinity just started a choir, and I'm in it! Not only that, but last night right before practice the director asked me to be on the "front line"- she has two people from each part sing with mics to make it easier to make sure the parts are balanced through the sound system. We really had a good time and God really showed up. It was awesome.

The link:
http://trinitywired.com/media/service  The whole service is about an hour, but the music portion is probably only 15 minutes or so. I hope you enjoy it!

Teething time!

That's the first name that jumped into my head for this post. DJ has been teething really badly today- super clingy, doesn't want to do anything but eat and snuggle. Awesome for mommy baby time, not so awesome for getting things done. He's working on his 8th tooth in 8 months! Crazy kid...

My main goal for this week was going to be getting to bed by 11:00. Last night should have been the first night for that- but I forgot to eat supper somehow, and then David made us awesome cappuccino blender drinks around 8:30 (right after DJ went to bed last night) and I had one. Caffeine on an empty stomach- bad bad idea.11:00 rolled around and David and I were in the middle of watching The Biggest Loser. I decided I'd stay up until that was done, or was it till I finished my round on my knitting? Either way, it was 1:00 before I started to head to bed, and I don't think I fell asleep until 2:30 in the morning. And once I did fall asleep, I had the weirdest knitting combined Biggest Loser dreams... very very odd.

I'm still going to try to get to bed by 11:00 the rest of the week- but I've switched my "official" weekly goal to having a menu plan.

Monday- We had Pork stew tonight, and I made bread for sandwiches to go along with the lunch meat David bought. That will be lunch for some of the week. We've got eggs for breakfasts (did you know that 2 eggs provides your minimum daily requirement for protein- in the perfect proportions?) and we've still got left overs for some lunches as well.

Tuesday night I'm making pizza,

Wednesday night we'll have LO (Left over) stew and I'll make corn bread to go with it

Thursday will be LO pizza

Friday is Friday nights (we host a knit group and one of the gals cooks for everyone)

Saturday we're having pancakes for breakfast, and mac & cheese, and any other left overs we've still got. 

Sunday officially starts a new week- I hope to go grocery shopping on Sunday, as well as make sure my next menu plan is figured out. :)

I tend to cook large portions, and it takes us a while to eat through them. The stew we had tonight probably could last us a good portion of the week if we ate it every day. I'd freeze some, but our little fridge freezer freezer burns left overs in 2 weeks time, and it gets really frustrating. We are looking at getting a chest freezer, but it might be a while before we get it... we'll see.

Ramble much? ;)

Finally, the picture you've all been waiting for: DJ kept grabbing at my knitting yesterday, so I gave him some waste yarn of his own to play with. He was concentrating so hard, trying to figure out what it is about yarn that mommy likes so much! He was even sort of making little "knitting" motions too- copy cat. ;)

Weeks 8 & 9

I went into week 8 without a specific goal- I had been doing well at getting up by 8 the previous week, (and I'm still rockin that one out!) but when I realized that I didn't have a plan yet a couple of days into the week, I was a little discouraged. I was thinking about it last Wednesday, and I didn't want to start working on a new goal half way through the week. As I looked back over the week so far- I realized that there was one thing I had been doing every day that was on my list of goals- drinking tea everyday! Week 8 became my tea drinking week. I love tea. I might have to do a blog post about my favorites at some point, but I'm going to stick with telling you about my weekly goals in this post.

Feb 27-Mar 5 is week 9. My goal for this week is to read to DJ a bed time story every night. I know reading to him is important, and I think bedtime stories are the perfect way to incorporate reading into our schedule. I didn't get to read to him last night though- he fell asleep at 7:30, which is half an hour before his bedtime routine starts. Tired little guy! I think he slept until ~6:30 this morning too... I'm not totally sure what time he woke up. I could hear him making happy little noises in his crib while my alarm was going off, but it took me a little longer to wake myself up and get me out of bed (closer to 7:50 :P) .

If there is one thing I learned from week 8, it is to pick my goal early enough that when the first day of the next week comes, I can start right into it. Week 10 eh? I wonder what my goal should be... Getting to bed by 11:00 at the latest? Putting Menu plans in place? ooh. I like that last one. Well, both of them. I guess I've got the next two weeks planned out in advance. :D

Quick picture: A shawl I finished knitting last week, and DJ being my very cute model.