Flylady zones (and spices)

I'm a natural-born slob. I'd rather do anything than housework, and for most of my married life, I've done only what I had to do as far as household cleaning. I've shoved my clutter into one room and closed the door, I've piled magazines and books in a pile beside my chair, only to be moved if I knew somebody was coming to visit.

Then I discovered Flylady, and found out I'm not a slob after all; I'm a S.H.E. (sidetracked home executive). People who are B.O.'s (born organized) cannot help us S.H.E.'s, because their minds don't work like ours; we may as well live on a different planet.

Marla, the Flylady herself, was just as disorganized as I am until she met the original Slob sisters (seen on Oprah and many other daytime T.V. shows) and straighted up her house and her act. Then she started helping the rest of us S.H.E.'s.

Flylady puts different parts of the house into zones, and you work in that zone for one week a month (sometimes just part of a week, if it's an easy zone).

If you do things right, your whole house will be cleaned each month, one zone at a time. I've never done it anywhere near perfectly, but I'm doing enough F.L.Y.'ing (F.L.Y. = finally loving yourself) to make a big difference around here. One of Flylady's favorite little quotes is "progress, not perfection". Another is "Housework done imperfectly still blesses your family." In other words, do something, lest ye do nothing.

Had I done my kitchen zone perfectly last week, every cabinet would be straightened and both windows washed. I washed no windows (it's really cold here) and only got around to half my cabinets. But good grief, what a difference that made!

The cabinets in this old house are not easy to get to, so it's easy to lose things in the back, behind all the cans and bottles. I found two giant, Sam's-Club-size containers of peanut butter and two big jars of dill pickle slices that I didn't even know I had.

I have lots of spices, but there are some I only use perhaps a couple of times a year. Going through all that assortment every time I needed a spice was an exercise in frustration. For some reason, I could never find the thyme, ever, without taking twenty little spice bottles out of the cabinet. And I use thyme in a lot of recipes!

In going through the spices, I found I had doubles, and even triples, of some spices. If they were so old they were in metal cans, I tossed them; spices haven't come in metal cans for years! I threw all my old pickling spices away, because I don't foresee any pickle-making in my future. If I should become industrious some summer and raise lots of cucumbers, I'll buy fresh new spices.

I took the spices I use fairly often and put them in a flat Tupperware container that I never used anyway, so they're all together and I can pull them down and go through them.





The rest, I left on the shelf in a corner.


If you're a B.O., you'll find all this quite silly. If you're a S.H.E. like me, however, you might want to check out Flylady and The Slob Sisters (they'll ask you to name your inner brat... my inner brat is named Erika).

Housework isn't so bad, done fifteen minutes at a time.