Clean Your Room!

I hate when I give in and clean up after my husband, and then once everything is cleaned, I'm super protective of my work. Like if I just Pledge'd the normally cluttered and dish/drinking glass covered coffee table, I have to fight the urge to actually snarl when plates and glasses start to collect on my once perfectly clean coffee table.

Our bedroom, however, is a different story. We live in a Escheresque split level townhome with the bedroom on the top level and the washer and dryer in the garage at the very bottom. This is roughly what our house looks like from the side:

Obviously, this is not to scale, but you get the idea. It takes a lot of walking up stairs for things to make it into our room, so once there, they usually just get thrown somewhere - the floor, a dresser, wherever. 

So - because I am embarrassed to post a photo of what it actually looked like - here is a paintbrush sketch of what one would see when they walked into our room (not to scale): 

What it should have looked like

What it did look like

Something I couldn't quite get the right look of in paint was the clumps of dog hair floating around on the floor and embedded into the area rug (which doesn't actually look like puke, by the way. I'm just too lazy to attempt actual detailed designs)

Last weekend we decided to do something about this embarrassment mess. If we have people over, we should be able to instruct them how to get to the second bathroom without thinking, "maybe I can stall them long enough that the downstairs bathroom will open up."

It took the two of us most of the day to get all the clothes/junk picked up off the floor and put away or thrown in the wash, clear off the dressers and end tables, sweep/mop/vacuum up the dog hair, pull the sheet/dog hair cover off the papasan chair, put on a new one and wash the old one, change the sheets/pillow cases, rearrange the furniture.

It is so great to finally have a clean room. It's been nearly spotless for over a week and we've been working hard to keep it that way. Clothes aren't getting left on the floor. The get immediately put away or into one of two strategically placed hampers. When the hampers are downstairs because I'm doing laundry, we have a designated pile where the clothes go until a hamper becomes available. 

I'm really trying to stay on top of the dog hair clumps. I noticed a few accumulating behind Panda's bed (the papasan chair), so I made a note to myself to get those picked up when I get home today. 

This morning my husband left the ironing board out in the middle of the room. I was about to leave it there out of lazy-stubbornness, but I looked at it and all I could see were imaginary piles of clothes and other junk accumulating on and around it, so I folded it up and put it in the closet. 

When I left this morning, our room looked more like this:

And this...I like. 

Sidenote: Yes, the walls are actually two different shades of red, and no, we did not paint them that way. We just have not had a chance to repaint them yet.