week 50: making plans, making room
this week on the little dream farm
I’d venture a guess we’re all familiar with the concept of spring-cleaning.
Today, I’d love to tell you about how I’ve shifted my all-things inside spring-cleaning to the left to take advantage of the quiet months of winter for tackling little odds and ends tasks.
As we’re dreaming up new dreams and making plans for the coming year ahead, I also like to clear space, tidy up, and make room.
Breakfast and dinner here on the LDF for the Furmer crew are two of my favorite moments of every day. When we switched to Darwin’s raw cat food, I knew that we were making the very best decision for our seven kitties health and wellbeing.
The way they show up to meal time excited for every single meal.
The way they all go to their respective places and wait patiently for their bowl.
The way they all smack their food as they eat.
The way they lick their bowls clean and gobble up every single morsel.
The way they all sit together in the kitchen and lick themselves silly post-meal.
We swapped to Darwin’s for their health, but we stick with Darwin’s because the cats are obsessed with their food, and we can’t get enough of meal time with the Furmers every day!
Ready to make the swap for your cat(s) or dog(s)? Use the code: FURMERS at checkout to get 50% off your first order by visiting Darwin’s site and placing an order here.
And now back to the Farm Note…
Here on the farm, spring is quite possibly the worst time of year to have the time for inside spring-cleaning-type activities.
Those are the months where everything outside is waking up. Where we’re prepping garden beds, planting seeds, readying flowers, planning garden layouts, and gearing everything up for the growing season. Our chores begin to shift outside to planning for things like staining the house and the deck, tuning up equipment, moving fences, and giving everything outside refresh.
I’ve found that if the inside stuff doesn’t get done in the winter…it’s probably not getting done. So, today’s Farm Note is a round up of some of the things I’m currently working on in the house in case it helps give you a few ideas or inspiration for tackling some of the things on your list, too.
Here’s what I’ve been up to lately…
Unsubscribe:
Following the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, not only am I in need of a credit card moratorium for a few weeks, but I also start craving less noise in my inbox. This time of year is precisely when I go through and mass unsubscribe from all kinds of marketing emails and from email lists of things I subscribed to throughout the year that I find myself deleting regularly without reading. Simply unsubscribe as emails come in or let it all pile up over a few days and batch it all together at once. Ahhh…feels good!
Digital Cleanup:
Is it just me or can our digital world become a total cluttered mess? While things begin to slow down at work, I like to use this time to clean up my desktop and file things into folders. I do all of this on my personal devices too, to include going through my photos month by month on my phone and deleting duplicates or random photos I don’t plan to keep. I continue this onto social by unfollowing accounts I no longer wish to follow and un-saving things I’ve bookmarked that I no longer need. Who knew digital tidiness could feel so good!
Tidying up and Cleaning Out:
We get asked regularly how we keep our house so clean with seven cats in tow. I always laugh when someone asks, because truly you just can’t look too closely at anything in our home or it’ll spoil the fantasy that we somehow secretly keep a perfectly clean home like there’s some trick to it. My trick? I clean. All the time. Like pretty much daily. And nothing is ever truly clean. If you’ve got pets and/or kids then you know this to be true—so I hate disappointing those who think there might be some kind of hack. I’m here to say there’s no hack!
Even still, this time of year I love to do a deep deep cleaning of every room in the house. Beds get moved so rugs can be cleaned. The vacuum is on for a half hour at a time so I can get along the baseboards, heat vents, ceilings and corners, and into every nook and cranny possible. Everything gets a good scrub and gosh does it feel (and look!) good!
Next up is cleaning out cabinets, closets, drawers and bins. I created this little checklist for our house that has all the rooms, closets, cabinets, and drawers on a list with a line next to each space. I then just go one by one by one and check it off. This task is normally so overwhelming when you think of it in total, so I like having the checklist so I can just go one drawer by one closet by one cabinet…room by room by room, and check them off as I have 10-30 minutes here and there. Love the feeling of a refresh!
Odd jobs:
Earlier this week I was carrying part of a toilet paper holder in my purse. It’s needed to be fixed literally since we moved in but it was just shoved in the back of a cabinet waiting for us to get to it someday. I finally went and grabbed a little set screw for the thing…an errand that took 3 years of putting it off and 3.5 minutes total in the hardware store. This year I’ve added all these little odd jobs to my list—things like spackling scuffs and bumps on walls, caulking spots in the house that need a refresh. Touching up paint. All those dinky little tasks we look past and say we’ll get to them at some point. This year we’re batching them up and getting to them so we can get them off my list and out of my brain!
Closet Cleanout:
This one is always hardest for me. We came to the farm with wardrobes full of clothes that made sense when Chris worked in a corporate office and I needed a handful of suits while getting my MBA and we lived in the city and had all kinds of things to wear nice clothes to. Life on the farm and out in the country while we work from home has proved not to have any use for so many of these items, and I’ve not yet found the perfect balance to let them all go or hang on. So, this year I’m thinking of my clothes the same way we might change our perspective on the nicer things we save for special occasions.
This isn’t a practice life. We are here now. Life is happening right now. Instead of keeping all the nice clothes folded up and hanging in the closet for the possibility of wearing them some day, I’m getting them out and putting them on! This week I wore one nice outfit after the next and was reminded that it feels good to feel good. That it feels good to dress up, to take a few extra moments, and that every day is an occasion to use and enjoy and make the most of the nicest things we have, even if just to hang around at home.
The cleanout part? Well, as I make my way through wearing the nice stuff, I’ll be setting aside a pile of things to let go of and donate.
The Donation Boxes & Yard Sale:
While all of this is going on, I’m setting aside boxes and bags in a corner out in the milk house. We’re planning to host our first yard sale in the summer. When we moved here we inherited a lot of things from David and the lower barn is something we’ve not quite yet fully cleaned out the way we’d like to. So we’re hoping to offload the things we don’t use or likely won’t have use for and then donate all the rest.
If you’re reading through this and the mental list is stacking up for you, might I offer that you brain dump it onto a piece of paper and step away from it for a bit. Come back to it, figure out what tasks can be batched together, and then make an organized list of how to get after it over a few weeks or the next few months.
Like with anything in life, when taken in bite-sized pieces, step by step and one by one, we can always knock out the big stuff—or the big list of little stuff—without all the overwhelm.
Last year, I found that shifting all the inside spring-cleaning stuff to be winter-cleaning not only helps get things off the plate when the spring furry of activity begins, but last year it also helped me feel really centered heading into a new year. And bonus—it’s wonderful to enjoy a cozy, clean, tidy place while we’re spending just about all of our time inside.
Happy winter-cleaning to you if you decide to get into it in the coming weeks and months, and enjoy the process of tidying up and the comfort it brings once its complete!
I’ve ordered several bags of these laundry pods and dryer sheet set now and it’s got to be my favorite laundry scent I’ve ever encountered. The best is doing bedding and towels and walking into the bathrooms and bedrooms over the next few days while the scent of fresh laundry fills the air.
I got this little carpet cleaner for my mom last year and she can’t say enough good things about it. She has three dogs and uses it on her couches, carpets, flooring, her car, the patio furniture…it’s really come in handy for her and right now it’s on sale!
I share this hair lifter tool quite often and if you have yet to order it I’m not entirely sure what you’re waiting on! If you have pets it’s one of the best tools for cleaning up hair—I use it on furniture, lamp shades, rugs, even on hard surfaces. You can sweep it under hard-to-reach places and it’s so easy to unload the hair and keep the tool clean. We’ve had ours for several years and it holds up to my daily use all over the house!
*Note: Not all, but most of these links are affiliate links. That’s no matter to you, as it costs you nothing. However, if you make a purchase, we -may- receive a teeny weeny commission.
One thing you mentioned, dressing up while at home......I can not make myself do that. I wear the same home clothes all the time. I do go to an office so I dress for that. Growing up on a farm I had farm clothes and one or two nice outfits. Good for you to do that.
Can you believe it's week 50?? Intellectually, I know that it is but seeing it in print blows my mind. Two weeks left in the year. Time flies.
I love the idea of tackling household chores in the winter. Who wants to be cleaning when you have spring fever?😊.
Thank you for the info about the rug cleaner. I am in the market for a new one and this checks all the boxes.