20 Days to Organise & Clean your home Challenge – Day 4

I am participating in the The Organised Housewife's 20 Days to Organise & Clean your home Challenge. If you haven't already signed up, it's not too late to start! Just follow this link to subscribe.

After two days off challenges this week due to work I am gradually catching up. It is Saturday and I have just completed Thursday's (Day 4) challenge which was the LOUNGE ROOM. You can find all the information you need know about Day 4's challenge here. 


CLEAN the lounge room

Our lounge room is also our children's play room which means it contains quite of lot of stuff in a small area and by the end of each day looks like chaos. Once the children are in bed we spent 5 minutes each evening returning toys to their boxes and clearing everything off the floor so we can relax for the evening and have a clean slate each morning. I find that if any toys are left out, they are just ignored by the children while they go searching in their boxes for new toys. As this challenge was only to clean the lounge room I am hoping that a "play room de-cluttering" challenge might come up soon so that I can focus on reducing the amount of toys/books in the Expedit book case.

After packing all the toys/books away and returning items back to their homes, cushions were placed on the washing line in sunshine for a few hours to help remove dust mites, all surfaces/photos/ornaments were dusted, the remote controls were cleaned and couch vacuumed.

DE-CLUTTER your magazine collection

My mum has given me subscriptions to parenting magazines since I was first pregnant with Master two-and-a-bit and I enjoy reading them as they are a light read which always seems to have something pertinent to our parenting journey each month. I already have an organised system to store them but it has occurred to me that I have been keeping them with the aim of reading over old issues again but never seeming to get around to it. I need to rethink this and either give them to a new mum or donate them to the local library.

ORGANISE pamper yourself with "me" time

I am getting a little bit better at organising some "me" time and recently arranged to finally get the massage that the children got me for Mother's Day! I have also just received an invitation from a friend to go to a High-Tea at a local chocolatier so have arranged babysitting while I go out and enjoy some chocolaty heaven for a few hours! Can't wait!

NEW HABIT say NO

Hmm .. this is sometimes a hard one for me that I will consciously have to work on. When hubbie is away I am pretty good at not overdoing it with too many commitments but when he is home I usually try to squeeze in as much as possible either to make the most of an extra set of hands or just to do more things as a family. Life can become quite hectic. For this task, I am going to try to find a bit more balance when hubbie is home by reducing the activities and catch ups I organise and spend more time chilling out at home as a family.

5 MINUTES ONLY clean windows of main areas of your home 

Cleaning all of the windows in the main area of our home, which for us is the living/dining/kitchen area would take quite a bit longer than 5 minutes so for this task I'm just choosing to spend 5 minutes cleaning the back sliding door. Between our dog and the children this door gets filthy so giving it a quick clean will make a big difference to this area.


Day 5's focus area is the floors. You can learn more about the individual tasks here. I'm going to try to get all of the task's done today so I can have Sunday off!

Mel xx