new year's resolutions (a week late...i know, i know) and decorating dilemmas

as you know from my post last week, i am torn in my opinion of the importance (or irrelevance) of making resolutions. however, kirk and i did have a good chat last week about how to be more productive with our time AND simultaneously creating time to rest. we talked about what it looks like for us to rest/be productive on a daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal basis. anyway, we came up with a few ideas, such as kirk taking a few vacation days a year to go for a good long bike ride (that's rest to him...crazy), or spending 10 minutes a day cleaning/tidying so that the house doesn't become overwhelmingly cluttered. so, then i found a handy little list on apartment therapy for cleaning house 20 minutes/day in 30 days. i like this plan because it doesn't seem too daunting; it breaks up the chores so that it keeps cleaning from becoming a huge, all-day project. here's my altered version:

Tips for cleaning the house in 20 minutes/day:

1. Deal with what comes through the door (mail, keys, coats, shoes, etc)...still working on that one. don't really have a great system.

2. Deal with dishes, recycling, composting everyday after dinner so it doesn't start to pile up.

3. Set the timer for 20 minutes!

Daily Tasks over a 30-day period:

1. Surface clean living room and kitchen (pick up stray items, dust)

2. Clean bathroom (toilet, shower, sink/counter, mirror)

3. Surface clean bedroom (put away clothes, dust)

4. Surface clean extra rooms (office, basement, laundry room, dining room, etc)

5. Surface clean living room and kitchen

6. Clean bathroom

7. Clean all interior windows

8. Sweep and vacuum all floors

9. Surface clean bedrooms

10. Deep clean living room (dust baseboards, artwork, windows)

11. Clean bathroom

12. Clean out closets (hang up clothes, etc)

13. Surface clean extra rooms

14. Deep clean bedrooms (organize, tidy closet, dust)

15. Surface clean living room and kitchen

16. Deep clean bathroom (clean out drawers, mop)

17. Clean all doorknobs, remotes, switch plates, banisters, etc (this one is weird to me, i'm not really one of those germ-people...maybe i'll just take this day off!)

18. Clean out the fridge (take out food, wipe down, organize, make grocery list to restock)

19. Clean entryway, sweep porch, clean out car

20. Surface clean living room and kitchen

21. Surface clean bathroom

22. Surface clean bedroom

23. Sweep and vacuum all floors

24. Clean/tidy linen closet (organize towels/sheets)

25. Surface clean living room and kitchen

26. Deepclean kitchen (scrub appliances, wash out trash can, dust baseboards, wipe and reorganize cabinets

27. Surface cleanbathroom

28. Surface clean bedroom

29. Clean one area that you've been meaning to get to but have neglected (yardwork, hello!)

30. Sweep and vacuum all floors

so far, the daily task has taken longer than 20 minutes/day (about 45-60ish) but i'm thinking that if i keep up with the list, it will get more and more efficient each time. if i am sweeping all the floors 3 times a month, for example, instead of once every 2 months (embarrassing!) then, it will not be such a big job each time.

in keeping with this theme of getting my life organized, i reorganized my "office closet" on saturday (i'm a party animal). this, mind you, was not on the cleaning list for saturday, but i will share with you what lead to this:

our c-mas tree was sitting on a dresser i found on craigslist (for $35 or $40, i think!) that i bought with the intention of painting a bright color to act as a tv stand in our living room. here's the dresser in it's "before" state:

problem is, now the look of it is kind of growing on me, so i'm debating whether or not to actually paint it. i wanted to paint it a glossy lemony-mustardy-yellow like this, because you may notice a theme in our living room: A LOT OF BROWN (big brown bookcase, big brown piano, brown hardwood floors, brown couch, brown, brown, brown). i need something different, something exciting. so, dilemma #1 is to paint or not to paint. what do you guys think??

ok, but let me get back to how this led to my organized closet. so, we switched out the new found dresser after taking down c-mas decor for the old dresser-acting-as-tv-stand, which lead to kirk having to finally clean out his junk drawers from the old dresser. hideous. i tried to set up a little drawer for keys, phone books, etc and kirk soon absconded the drawer for papers, batteries, loose change, cords, cables, and all sorts of things that i have no idea what to do with. so we spent HOURS zip-tying all of the cables, sorting everything into categories, and i got to make labels for all the plastic bins accordingly. i love labels.

so now, dilemma #2: as you see from my living room pics above we have a lot of woodwork in the house (door frames, window frames, baseboards, etc) and we are debating whether or not to paint them white. our main objection: a lot of work. we're kind of lazy, ultimately. but really, we both prefer white painted woodwork unless the woodwork is HIGH quality, which ours is NOT (which you could see from closer up...most of the varnish is sticky, wood is cheap, and in a few rooms the window sills have so much sun damage that we really need to refinish them anyway, but to take on the whole house...whew!). almost every home in design blogs or magazines that i love has white painted woodwork. we really have to decide before we start our bathroom project because we are going to gut the bathroom and whatever we put in there for baseboards and windows i will want to match the rest of the house, so...what do you guys think??

lastly, and not really a dilemma, i had an idea of what to do with our previous dresser-as-a-tv-stand (pictured on the left below). i think i may paint it with blackboard paint and put it upstairs in our future attic-guest-room-playroom-media-room. i have wanted to use blackboard paint for something, but really don't enjoy using chalk at all (hate the chalk-under-the-finger-nails thing). so, i thought i could turn the dresser into a "toy bin" of sorts, filling the drawers with sidewalk chalk, crayons, markers, craft supplies, toys, and kids books for when we have the nieces and nephews over. my worry: by the time i make this attic-playroom-etc a reality all of our nieces and nephews will have grown! kirk says that by then it will be our nieces and nephews' children playing in our attic-playroom!