- day one: surface clean one room -- this was helpful, since I do this pretty much daily in the kitchen, but it's erratic elsewhere, especially upstairs, and I think I'm going to try to set a goal to at least do this once a month in all the rooms. (For those of you who are disgusted by the idea that I only clean my rooms once a month -- well, all I can say is look away!)
- buy fresh flowers -- I already do this pretty much once a week, although whenever I can, I gather stuff from the yard rather than buying flowers. And in autumn, it's more likely to be gourds, pumpkins, branches of bittersweet, etc, rather than fresh flowers, which is pretty inexpensive, since they last for a good three months. But winter is coming, and in winter, I always buy flowers weekly. A girl does what she's gotta do to get through the Chicago winter. I also knew the bits he said in the video -- cut under running water, strip any greenery that's going to be under the water, change water every other day (actually, I can't remember if he said that, but he should've), buy one inexpensive bunch (his was $3), and use it for one larger vase, and a few smaller ones to spot around the house. I'm not sure when I learned all that, but it's firmly in my head now. :-)
- collect shelter porn to inspire you -- much of the last two years, I've been doing this! But he did inspire me to sign up for a Pinterest account -- once that's approved, I'd like to move a lot of these photos off my computer and into a medium that's easier to share with the world. That'll be fun. I often see things on Design*Sponge in particular that I want to remember -- Pinterest seems like a good medium for that. We'll see.
- remove one thing and create an outbox -- wow, reading the comments, it's clear that a lot of people are traumatized by letting go of stuff. Me, not so much -- I tend to go in the opposite direction, and ruthlessly clean out things that it later turns out that I could use. Oops. My home actually is relatively spare these days -- especially for a Victorian! :-) It probably helps that we've moved four times in the last two years -- in every move, a lot of stuff was sent off to The Brown Elephant, our local version of Goodwill. And if I put broken old dining chairs out by my trash cans, it turns out the neighbors are quite happy to take them. I hope they repair them before trying to sit in them! :-)
Update: Day 5 is switch out a cleaning product for an eco-friendlier one. I've been meaning to do more of this; with the small kids, lots of our old cleaning products make me nervous. Pretty often, I just clean with a wet sponge and a dry cloth after -- that works on most stuff, and I microwave the sponge periodically to kill bacteria. We use Method dish soap already; I just ordered some Method dishwashing tablets for the dishwasher, since the AT readers claim they work well. And people seem to like Mrs. Meyer's products, so I also ordered one of her countertop cleaning sprays in lavender -- if I like it, it looks like you can just get the refills after that, and reuse the same spray bottle. We'll see how it goes. I do kind of hate to throw out the old cleaning products -- feels so wasteful. I guess I'll put them out by the garbage cans and hope someone takes them. I can't imagine that's worse for the environment than just throwing them out would be -- either way, they're ending up in the landfill / groundwater eventually.
Pinterest is awesome!! Be sure to post when you’ve set up you boards so we can follow you.