MARTHA STEWART WOULD BE APPALLED!

If anybody knows me, they know my least favorite thing in the whole world is cleaning. Or maybe i just know i have better things to do with my time then scrub the bathtub.  Like ride a horse, or play in the garden, or play with my camera, or be with my kids, or have a drink in the Barn Bar with my wonderful husband.  And besides, the dirt will always be there waiting for me to wipe it away, but the beautiful sweet light only lasts for about 2 hours total in a day!  I have my priorities, ya know! So i put things off, like cleaning out and organizing closets. I usually get to those in the winter when there are fewer things to do outside.  And let's face it, who wants to be indoors when its nice outside, and who wants to be outdoors when its frickin' cold???

So the inside of my house suffers from a lack of neatness and a slight layer of dust and dirt during the summer, but the barns look good. Its sparkly clean. In the winter the barn suffers from barn stank due to large quantities of poop that can't be picked up because they freeze instantaneously. So  it truly is an impossible task to clean up the barn in the winter, unless i want to stand out there all day with a shovel held up under the goats and horses butt waiting for the inevitable. So in the winter the house gets the pleasure of receiving a thorough cleansing. Or at least the closets get reorganized here and there.

So i decided to tackle one of these closets i have yesterday.  It was a large, daunting task, one met with struggle and a huge sigh as i opened the door to the mudroom hall closet and peered in.

In this picture, i had already started removing some of the contents

"Crap! That's a lot of crap," I said out loud to no one in particular because the current audience i had was a myriad of cats and of course Edy.  "Gosh, when was the last time i actually cleaned this sucker?" Still no audience reaction, not even a slight yawn.  So, i thought to myself this time and said, "Guess i better just start from the beginning."  And starting pulling everything out that was contained within.

This was almost everything that was in there

I found a bunch of cleaning items....I guess i knew i had them....

I found objects that were old....too old, like from before we even moved here.  How the heck did that happen???

See the date? It reads April, 1992!!! We moved here in 2003. Where the hell did it come from?

I also found things from years ago that brought back memories:

Madison created this doggie biscuit bakery when we first started doing farmer's market, it lasted about 2 months.

After what felt like hours, even days of back breaking labor: scrubbing, removing, throwing out things, wondering what the heck things were, I found the floor!  Then i proceeded to return the objects in a nice, orderly fashion to the shelves.  Even tucked into little Rubbermaid containers so that they had a home this time. (it really only took about 1 1/2 hours of my precious time)

Cleaned and organized

Now that that closet is completed, i won't have to even consider reorganizing or cleaning it out again until January 2012!  Yay!  I just created a whole year free of anxiety from cleaning out a closet.  Damn I'm good!