From slob to...not so slobby!

My name is Ginny...and I'm a reformed slob.

As a teenager I was untidy...messy...a bit of a pig (no offence to pigs).  There, I've said it. The clean genes seemed to have bypassed me and my bedroom deserved a condemned sign on it.  I remember coming home for school one day to hear my mother and middle-sister sniggering as I walked down the hallway to my bedroom.  There on the door was a handmade sign warning that a Boeing 747 had gone down in my room and they were still searching for survivors.  Hardy-ha-ha! My room was hardly messy enough to lose the entire crew and passengers of a jumbo jet...maybe a 737...just maybe messy enough for that!

There was something to be said for tidying up my bedroom in a frenzy before friends came to stay. Nothing quite like identifying missing plates, cutlery and mugs by smell alone, as they hid among the laundry (both clean and not so clean) that lay piled on the floor, next to the empty set of drawers.  Who knew that even water left long enough in a glass could go off...

When did the "messy" genes dissipate and the "not so happy to live in a pile of rubbish" genes take over?  I think it had something to do with moving out of home and into my own place. Suddenly there wasn't a mother (who occasionally would throw her hands up in the air with horror at the mess and help me trough out my space) to fall back on.  

Maybe it was becoming a bit more mature and taking some pride in my surroundings..or maybe it was the onset of some sort of neurosis.  Whatever the cause, now I can't stand too much mess. In fact, coming home to any sort of disorder after a week away will send me into a spin. So whenever I travel for work or a holiday (ha ha - who am I kidding, it always seems to be for work), after packing my bag, I do a crazy, rush through the housework episode before I load my suitcase into the car and head for the airport.

Less than a minute from this...

...to this

Coming home to "clean" makes me happy.  It may not stay immaculate for long, but before I know it, suitcase is packed again, and cleaning frenzy commences.  

My latest barometer for how busy my life is, or how lax I've become in my cleaning is my bedroom chest of drawers. You see, last year I heard about the Marie Kondo style of living, and being too cheap to buy her book, had watched a multitude of clips about how to organise my life the Konmari way.  She talks about surrounding yourself with things that make you happy, and stuff like that.  Now I'm all for surrounding myself with things that make me happy, but my budget doesn't stretch to a Maserati or a live-on masseuse called Sven, so I've settled for tackling some of her organisational tips.

One of my first attempts was the bedroom duchess.  And now, after a year of perseverance, my set of drawers have become a wonder to me.  Every time I open a drawer, I gasp in awe at the streamline, tidiness of it all - tops ordered by type, vertically displayed for ease of grabbing a suitable garment for the day.  Nothing too old or had-it, everything tidy and just as it should be. So to my surprise the other day I realised just how dis-organised those drawers were becoming, and put it down to tiredness, and being busy and a general lack of time. That being said, after giving myself a mental kick in the butt - it took all of twenty minutes to set my clothes to rights again. Maybe it wasn't a lack of time, or about the tiredness, or even being busy, and maybe more about being a little bit lazy, and maybe it was also about those "happy to live in a pile of rubbish" genes trying to reassert themselves again.  

From chaos

To some semblance of order

While I relish the tidy, I find it all to easy to slip back into some of those bad habits...my organised wardrobe is all of a sudden not so organised.  The cutlery drawer is in a tad of disarray, the bathroom drawer is a little messier than I would prefer, and before you even know it, I open up the linen cupboard and am attacked by a tower of face clothes and a stack of towels that have been balancing precariously from the last time I opened up the cupboard and hurriedly and haphazardly threw in the clean, barely folded linen.  And with the onset of messy comes the onset of anxiety.  

So for me, and my neurosis, the lessor of the two evils is to move my lazy behind, and get some tidying done.  While that might seem a little on the "crazy" spectrum, I guess my home should be just as I want it to be...at the end of the day, it's my space. Meanwhile, I'm about to head back to the airport, my suitcase is already in the car. So let the cleaning begin...

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