Clean Freaks

I would like to take a moment to personally thank HGTV for making me feel like the laziest slob to ever walk the face of the Earth.  How did this happen, you may ask? I watched Clean Freaks online last night, and it left me feeling like a complete failure as a person. Alright, that might be a bit melodramatic, but it did leave me feeling pretty inadequate in my homemaking skills.

I like to think of myself as a fairly organized person, even if sometimes that organization never really makes it out of my head and into reality. I remember speaking with someone before my husband and I got married about why I didn't have him over to my house as much as he would've liked. My reason? I wanted my house to look like a magazine, and if it didn't meet that standard (or as close as I could get anyway) I didn't want to let anyone in. This was met, perhaps understandably so, with laughter and a reassuring, "You better get over that if you want a lot of kids!" How right they were.

Now I frequently feel like I live with a bunch of evil gremlins whose sole mission on this planet is to destroy any sense of order I'm able to create in this house. Of course, these gremlins are some of my favorite people in the world, and I also happen to think they're the sweetest, most amazing things since sliced bread, but they do love to create a good mess. It's hard to make much progress in organizing and decorating this new(ish) home when I have three little ones running after me knocking over everything in sight.

Having a house that resembles a magazine is still my goal though. In preparing our old house for sale, we finally decorated and used spaces that had been empty for years. I don't want to wait until we're trying to get rid of this place to make it into a space we love and enjoy. It's a daunting task though. Our old house was the first my husband and I shared together. Most of our furniture was purchased for specific rooms, and we basically had a blank slate. In our new house, none of our furniture really seems to fit. Unfortunately, we don't have a great budget for furniture this time around so we're just going to do our best to make things work and maybe diy the rest.

Here's a link to HGTV's page Clean Freaks... watch if you dare! (And in all seriousness, there are some really great ideas in this episode. The gentle lights and music to wake up would be amazing!)