Mommy On Purpose

Rainbow Vacuum Cleaner - clothes budget killer

There you have it, plain and simple, the reason I no longer get to buy new clothes every month. I’m now spending my $50/month paying for R2-D2 up there. It goes to show you what a raving clean freak I’ve become, but seriously, the thing traps over 99% of everything it sucks up, rather that spewing it back into the air. To me, that’s more important than shopping. At least, that’s what I tell myself whenever I get the urge to shop. Then I go vacuum something, and I feel much better.

Now, in my defense, it wasn’t a totally irresponsible act. We didn’t buy it new, and the guy threw in the shampooer and stair attachments just to be nice. So we got about $3,000 dollars’ worth of paraphernalia for under $2000. I know, I know, still extremely irresponsible. But exactly how much is a clean, healthy home worth? Especially after you’ve gone through three lesser vacuums in three years?

Not all of them were Wal-mart specials either, one was an Airider that Chad got for free…

Airider hovering vacuum cleaner

… which I shouldn’t complain about at all, because it originally retails for about $450 and really was a good vacuum for a while. The thing hovered (for about the first year of its life) and the handset was self-propelled, so all I had to do was steer. But then it stopped hovering, and we moved into the new house and all the pet hair just about killed the poor thing.

Now, to make it a fair product review, I should let you know the pros and cons of the rainbow.

Rainbow Cons:

• Friggin HEAVY! And not self-propelled.
• Vacuum head doesn’t swivel on the main carpet attachment. The hardwood floor attachment does swivel. This makes it tricky to maneuver.
• Friggin expensive.
• MLM – have to buy it from a sales guy that may or may not assume you have a brain. Luckily, ours was cool.

Rainbow Pros:

• Seriously, the cleanest your carpet will ever ever get.
• Smells pretty. No “burning dust” smell that usually comes with vacuuming. Literally, it smells like taking a shower, all those negative ions in the air.
• Vacuuming can be a workout! I got the shorter hose, mostly because I don’t mind the physical labor. If you don’t want the workout, you can opt for up to a 30-foot hose.
• No banging out filters or changing bags. I used to HATE that! Because dust goes right back into the air and onto the floor. With Rainbow, you just dump the water tank into the toilet and flush.
• 20 year warrantee. Good luck finding a Dyson with THAT.
• Never loses suction. No filter to clog means consistent suction from beginning to end.
• Purifies the air. With or without the vacuum attachments in use, it’s purifying the air in your home. A couple of weeks ago we turned it on because there was cigarette smoke coming into our vents, and another time because we burned dinner. I’m asthmatic, so that’s a big deal in our house.

So… yes, I get little pangs of regret every time I go to Forever21.com, but honestly, anything I buy now will just be out of style in a year. R2-D2 will still be sucking powdered cheerios out of my carpet when the Cheerio Muncher is in college.

What is it about bureau drawers that just begs to be filled with stuff we’ll never see again? Is it the dark, secret recesses or the convenience of hiding one’s clutter away with one smooth, rolling motion into oblivion? The only problem is that, eventually, the clutter gets in the way of said smooth, rolling motion and you can no longer hide the fact that said dark, secret recesses are overflowing.

If I had my way, everything would go in the closet. But, let’s face it, does anyone REALLY have as much closet space as they would like? So we resort to the next most economical alternative, which, unless you get really clever with your storage solutions, is usually a chest of drawers.

Mine used to be horrendous, all three drawers I was allotted as part of the marriage contract (out of 8 total in the bureau we share… how that happened, I have no idea) up until Christmas when I got a whole bunch of new clothes and my closet and drawers vomited all over the floor. So we went to the most logical place to alleviate any home storage crisis: IKEA!

I’m telling you, the Swedes are geniuses. I know, because I am one. Anyway, that’s where we found this beauty for a whopping $120:

MALM dresser, $120 at IKEA

We bought it, brought it home, put it together, named it George, and promptly filled it up with crap. And that’s when I had a major organizational epiphany: space is only half of the game when it comes to being organized. Because even though my clothes were carefully divided up into their new, spacious homes, they still ended up looking just like the $2 bin at a sidewalk sale.

The other half of the game, I realized, was VISIBILITY! You can fold and refold and stack and restack, but what it really comes down to is 6am late for work and you can’t find that black tank top. So you’re going to tear that drawer apart looking for it, and wha-BAM all your folding and stacking has gone to pot.

This is the part where I remembered a post on one of my favorite blogs, written by Rachelle Wilkinson, a mother of quintuplets plus two older children. She shared that she placed folded clothes into drawers sideways so that every single item is plainly visible, no one item sits on top of or underneath another, so searching for and removing the aforementioned black tank top won’t disturb anything else in the drawer! Genius!

My T-Shirt drawer after 5 weeks

It’s a very long-lasting organization solution because you don’t have to go through and re-vamp every week, it uses the full capacity of the drawer (as opposed to those cute drawer organizer cubbies that only use half the volume of the drawer, or they just look like mini sidewalk sale bins–still not helpful!). It practically maintains itself. The only regression I’ve noticed is that it’s no longer color-coordinated like it was at onset. What can I say, I was a little overexcited.

Baby clothes drawer after 4 weeks

Even the baby’s clothes stay pretty tidy, as long as I can keep her grubby mitts out of them…

In other news, I’ve graduated and am now officially a Real Person out searching for work like the rest of everyone else on the planet. So until I find some good web design clients, I’ll be blogging a lot more frequently! Good news for all you faithful readers… :B

This was the first area I tackled when I decided to become a clean freak. Because if you can’t figure out a way to squeeze cleaning into every day, some how, some way, then you’re in trouble. Even if it’s spending 5 minutes to put your clothes in your hamper or stick your dishes in the washer, everyone has SOME time to clean up after themselves. You just have to make it a habit. And until it’s a habit, you have to make it a part of your routine.

So here’s the list of daily things that realistically COULD be done every day, listed from highest to lowest priority (in my opinion):

First, the bed. This step serves a double purpose, because it reduces the temptation to get back in bed. Which doesn’t help your cleaning goals for the day one bit!

The bed can easily take up half of the floor space in the bedroom, so if you make it, your room automatically looks 50% cleaner! The bed was the first thing I tried working into my routine. This was while I was still working and childless and convinced that I had NO time to clean. I made myself do it each morning before I left the bedroom after getting dressed. Mentally, I just kept telling myself: no breakfast till you make the bed. And it worked! Now I make the bed later in the day, but because it’s a fixed part of my daily routine, it always gets done.

Next, tidying. I haven’t broken myself of the habit of throwing crap all over the floor yet. So until I do, I’ve gotten myself INTO the habit of tidying up several times a day. As sloppy as my family is, we can’t possibly get away with just one tidy-up session on any given day. This is something I’m still working on… and you can tell because my house is only REALLY tidy when company’s coming. So I’m still playing with the schedule. Ideally, I would tidy up right before the baby woke up in the morning, right after she went down for a nap, and right before I went to bed at night. But the tricky thing about tidying is, the more you let it build up, the more intimidating it gets, which makes you that much less likely to ever do it again. As long as you live. So tidy while you can.

Dishes are a tricky thing too, because most people hate to do them, their schedule is more determined by how full the dish washer is than by whether or not it’s “time to do the dishes,” and small children make them almost entirely impossible (along with everything else you’d like to get done, right?). So my fix for this was, sadly, TV. It’s something I always swore I would never do, but that was back when I had all the answers, and no kids. Funny how that works. So I strap the cheerio-muncher in her high chair, plop her in front of a Wiggles video, and slam out some dishes. A lot of times, I run the dishwasher at about 75% capacity just to stay on schedule. Not very green of me, I know, but when you’re as lackadaisical as I am, that schedule’s the only thing that’ll keep you going.

So if you can get those three done, make the bed, tidy up, and do the dishes, by my standard you’ve done pretty well for the day. The next two items on the daily list are considered entirely optional in my house, but they sure make the house FEEL clean when you can get to them.

And by counters, I mean kitchen and bath. And on good days, I throw the kitchen table in for kicks and giggles. These are major trouble areas in my house, and fall more into the “tidy” category than actual “counters.” Again, the more often you tidy them, the easier they’ll be next time.

Sweeping doesn’t really do much for the visual aesthetic of a clean home, but if you have baby, between the mess factor of flying food and the ick factor of that food being found and consumed later on, sweeping is a big one.

So this is step 1 if you’re working on being cleaner and tidier. Some time I’ll put my weekly list up here and talk about the adventure THAT’s been.