The Getting Organised Plan. It's.....Working!

Last week, husband and I decided to focus on getting organised. The path to that decision is here.


Good news: it's happening.


One of the first chores was dealing with Miss 6's bedroom. It was a disastrous mess of clothes, toys and craft. (Oh, the craft. I didn't deal with that. Baby steps, right?)

It took hours, I won't lie, and it sucked. Big time. We chose to do most of the work without Miss 6's input to speed up the process and also enable us to make some tough decisions about chucking stuff out. McHappy toys went. Every one of them. It was McTherapeuatic.

I can hear the cries as I type: "No, you have to involve your children in tidying their rooms". Yeah, yeah, I know and with the general day to day or once a week clean-ups, I say yes, this is important.

But the one where you're going through their toy boxes? Nope. Sorry, that's just a nightmare. They decide to play with EVERY SINGLE piece of plastic you pull out of the box, messing with your sorting piles and getting frustrated with you for not playing with them. This clean up was no place for a child.

Also on the "getting organised" list was cooking - which meant shopping. We sucked it up and did it. Just like that. I made a list of what we would eat this week. Then I made a list of what we needed. Then (get this, this is medal-worthy), I consulted TWO supermarket catalogues and checked prices on those items before creating shopping lists for TWO DIFFERENT STORES.

CUE BALLOONS!

Imagine getting a 99% discount on your groceries. WTF?

OK, so maybe I'm not quite ready to go on Extreme Couponing but this is a big deal for me!

This approach was incredibly good for our budget (which is pretty much negative) and enabled us to also divide and conquer. Given how annoyingly busy the shops were on Easter Saturday morning, this proved to be a great strategy, almost halving our time at the shops and, because we each took a child with us, we didn't have to deal with them fighting the entire time. WIN-WIN.

After the shopping (and the putting away, because we do that immediately now of course) came the cooking. There was a bolognese, a goulash (I know, right?!) and a chicken and vegie pie. The pie is now in the freezer for later in the week when my parents come to stay. Because I'm impressive, Mum, that's why.

Some pantry sorting took place, the spare fridge got a much-needed clean out and something possessed me to clean the mirrors in the kids' rooms. That was weird. I organised to piggy-back onto a neighbour's council clean-up, did 4000 loads of washing and worked robo-vac like never before.

I am pleased to advise we are on track for our not exercising because we have other stuff to do goal.

What about you? Have you raised the organisation bar?