Thursday Catchup

It's now 3.30pm on Thursday, and I've spent the day running errands to the library, Post Office and pharmacy, followed by continuing my Flylady cleaning in Zone 2, the kitchen.

Today, was probably the messiest job, namely cleaning the oven, hob and the shelving around the area, which always has quite a layer of grease and dirt, especially if I haven't cleaned it for a while, which I haven't. 

I think, to my shame, the oven was last cleaned about a year ago, because I remember blogging about it, and it was pretty grot then.  In that post, I said I was going to clean it more often, but of course, I haven't.  My current excuse is that I've been busy at the CS in this past year and that was in the day's before Flylady, but we'll see if that stands the test of time moving forward.

It's not exactly perfect, but it is looking a lot cleaner and I'm hoping to clean it at least every two months using the Flylady system.  If we do get a new kitchen extension this year, I may have a completely new oven to keep clean, which should help motivate me.

I've been doing a little cleaning in the kitchen each day this week, even the days I was at the CS.  Saturday, I cleaned the fridge, Sunday I cleaned the microwave, Monday was the turn of the under sink cupboards, Tuesday I cleaned out the cutlery drawer, baking drawer and crockery drawer, Wednesday I cleared the window sills, washed everything and cleaned the windows too and then today it's been the oven, hob, drawer below, shelves around and hood (I just need to put the hood filters through the dishwasher, but I don't want to put them in with my crockery, as they are very greasy. I may even put them through the dishwasher using citric acid to clean them, but I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not.  I'll probably Google it.

Tomorrow, I'm cleaning inside and out of the cupboards, or as many as I can manage and on Saturday, I'm sweeping and mopping, cleaning the worktops and maybe doing the baseboards. I won't need to do all of these jobs next month, I'll probably focus on just a few that are really in need of doing. I think once I keep doing some cleaning regularly it will be so much more manageable on a daily basis. 

I've removed a lot of visual clutter from the worktops and streamlined things a lot, as many of the items we had out, didn't really need to be out on the worktops, so I'm happy about this, as it will also make cleaning easier in the future.  I have a few ideas to streamline further in coming months, but I do need to buy a couple of small organisational items to assist me with this and there's no money in the budget this month, so they will have to wait until next month now.

Flylady is still working for me, as you can tell, and is providing me with the motivation I need at the moment.  Even if I don't continue with it, it will have encouraged me to do a thorough spring clean at least.  The only drawback is that my hands and nails are really suffering, as a consequence of doing so much cleaning. There's always a price to pay with everything I guess.