“I just had the best day EVER!!! I scrubbed cat vomit out of my carpet in 3, count’em, 3 different places!! Then, to make it even better, I found the most AMAZING hairballs in the drains as I was cleaning the bathtubs! Wish you could have been here!”
As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure that most of my friends abhor the thought of having to scrub another toilet.
I had the pleasure of learning the secret to get yourself motivated to clean. Wanna know what it is? OF COURSE YOU DO! Who wouldn’t want to know this insanely awesome information? Are you ready? Really ready? Ok, here goes….
Set your mind on doing a job that you’ve been dreading for months… (i.e. cleaning your fish tank). Once you have your mind set, your kitchen will magically be buffed and shined better than you’ve ever seen it before. You will be able to see your face in the counters and you will have no trouble sliding across that newly shined kitchen floor in your socks! Every cabinet will be organized, your utensils will be in their designated homes, and unicorns will prance by in the backyard. Ok, not the unicorns. But you hopefully have the idea of how wonderful this trick is and how great it works!
I learned this secret by pure chance. I decided that today was the day that my fish would have a clean home. I had been contemplating cleaning out their tank for a couple weeks and just hadn’t gotten around to it, so, today was the day! I walked over to the tank and gave it a good stare-down, thinking about what to do first. I had to take the filter off and clean up the lid. I had to empty the rocks and other aquarium items as well. In order to clean all the aquarium items, I was going to need a clean sink. There were only a couple dishes to do, but I had to put the clean dishes away in order to have room for the newly washed dishes to dry. As I was putting the dishes away, I noticed that I didn’t have room for all of my glasses. That definitely would not work. I couldn’t have glasses without homes, so I opened all the cabinet doors and decided that in order to make room for everything, I needed to organize. All of the contents of my cabinets were removed and given new homes, as well as the tea glasses that hadn’t had a home since my husband brought them back from his trip to Jordan about a year ago. Hey, tea glasses need homes too! In finding new homes for the glasses, other items were left homeless. This created the need for a total cabinet overhaul. Even the junk spaces got cleaned out. I even found a food processor that I didn’t know I had. Of course, that needed to be washed and played with before it could be put away again.
Once I was satisfied with my squeaky clean cabinets, it was time to start on the fish tank. The stare-down began again. Then it hit me. I’m going to have to have everything out of the way in order to maneuver this fish tank and get all the water out, so I must clean my countertops off. I started by moving the dish drainer out of the way and decided that it was a good time to rearrange things. I mean, you can’t clean a fish tank if your counter is unorganized, right? RIGHT! Every item on my counter was washed and arranged in various locations until they inevitably ended up in the same spot they started out in. That’s ok though because as I was arranging and rearranging, I had my handy dandy Clorox Disinfecting Wipes
(the greatest invention since the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser
) on hand and scrubbed the counters down as I went. Counter extravaganza complete.Cleaning off the countertops left a few homeless food items and a few crumbs on the floor. This led to (begin Rocky theme song) the cleaning of my pantry and the sweeping of the floor. I am one of those OCD people who have to have everything in the pantry organized and with “like” items, so I couldn’t just throw the random items in there. They had to have a proper home. Pantry organized? Check! Floor swept? Check!
The only things left untouched in my kitchen were the stove (which had been cleaned the night before), and the fridge. I didn’t want them to feel left out, so I gave them a quick wipe down. There was nothing left to do other than mop the floor. But I figured it would be better to clean the fish tank out first and mop up the mess afterwards. Who knew that cleaning the fish tank would make your kitchen look brand new?
So you see, this really works! If you need to clean the house, do yard work, fold laundry, or do anything that you’ve been putting off for a while, just find a more tedious task and be determined to get that tedious task done at once. Before you know it, your house will look as though you hired professionals!
