Week One: Room Evaluation Part Two

Continuing cheerfully along from the previous post:

5. Assess the tasks. Now its time to fill in the chart at the bottom of the form. Imagine every possible cleaning task for the room, along with any of its closets. I know, every home and apartment is now open concept, and you get three or four rooms for the price of one.  If you list the cleaning tasks on the chart by area, you can fit in more tasks (!), then coordinate the main tasks for the area as if it were one room (dusting all the flat spaces in the area, or wiping the entire floor area, etc.)

Remember this is Clean Cup Cleaning, so be very thorough in your list. Of course, closets are the inside of the cup! Pull open the closet doors and study them as well. What do they need for straightening? What do they need for organizing? Well-organized closets, besides being one of the slowest areas to organize,  are often where people can eek out far more storage space than they imagined they had once they get around to it.

The tasks you list in the daily, weekly, and biweekly columns will normally be considered, the routine, surface, and/or maintenance cleaning items. Deep cleaning and organizational tasks  usually will fill in monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and yearly blanks. Be very specific, and err on the side of too often for the designated cleaning cycle. Record costs for tasks that may require a specialist or special equipment (drapery dry cleaning, yearly servicing of furnace, renting carpet cleaner, etc.)  Additional information will be in Frequently Asked Questions about Room Evaluations.

6. Design a trial routine. Plan a five or ten minute general, pick-up, tidy, maintenance cleaning routine for that room that you think will get you as close as possible to your unexpected visitor goal. This will help several ways:

• it will give you a starting routine to practice on and fine tune.
• it will give you a better idea of the issues that, if they were addressed once, would allow you to tidy the room more quickly on a regular basis.
• it (hopefully) will make you more patient with issues that cannot be immediately corrected, but still handle or attend to them in the best way possible until the more permanent changes can be made.
• it may also highlight a lingering ugliness that if corrected would eliminate the problem “forever.” (A water spot on the ceiling could be sealed and repainted in a relatively short period of time, but once done would never spoil the look of the room again).

The little five minute routine is not intended to completely make over the entire room. It is not intended to solve issues with one swish around the room. It is not expected to deal permanently with organizational clutter. Going back to the contentment question, the best spirit with which to approach this task is, “If this were all I had to work with for the rest of my life in this room, what is the best I can do with what is here?”

Concluding Thoughts Do you feel you now know the room better: its unique needs, its neglects, its good points? Do you have a sense of excitement that there are one or two things that could be done with little effort and no expense that would upgrade the room? Did your searching eye uncover several areas that may never have been cleaned, and now that they have come to your attention are very noticeable? Did the objective evaluation show you that your favorite vase is really out of place for the feel of the room–can you live it with, want it there no matter what, want to find another spot for it? Almost invariably, I was motivated enough to want to leave the room with an armful of clutter, or take “just a few minutes” to tidy up. If so, go ahead and see what you can do in only five minutes, but no more. You’ve done a lot of really hard thinking, and another room needs the same thinking tomorrow,  so don’t burn out.