When Your Sink is Shiny...

For quite awhile now I've been feeling...behind. Overwhelmed. Or maybe more like I'm drowning. I suppose there are many ways to describe it, but what it all boils down to is, I feel swamped. Between work, church, John, Zoe, family and other activities, there's no time left for housework.

And my house suffers.

Until now.

Last night I randomly found a web page with help. Real help. The first thing that caught my eye was the acronym CHAOS: Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Ha! Wow that hits home. There have been times that my doorbell rings and I look around my house and think, "Can I just not answer the door?" Or John will have a spur of the moment idea to invite somebody over for dinner and I cringe, thinking, "How much time do I have to clean before they get here?"

Hopefully today, Day One, will be the start of a routine for me.



Day One, according to FlyLady is shining your sink. That's it. Easy, right? Well the instructions are very detailed. It begins with emptying your sink (you don't even have to wash the dishes, just put them on the counter!) and filling it with hot water and 1 cup of bleach. For one hour. I did that, for both sides of my sink. Then rinse. Then I scrubbed with comet. Then rinse. Then I used my stone scraper to dig into any nook and cranny I could find. Then rinse. Finally, I sprayed some Windex on the sink and wiped it down with a paper towel. Then, the final step was to dry it out with a dish towel. Done!



Thus, the main point of Day One. Always, always, always dry out your sink when you're done. No water spots! And do not put dirty dishes in the sink. They suggest a dishpan under the sink for dirty dishes. I'm not so sure about that. We'll see.

Wow, does my sink look better! Better than it has since I've known it (for 3 long years). The clean sink motivated me to do all the dishes. (Of course I rinsed and dried out the sink after I washed the dishes.) I was going to leave them in the strainer...but wow, motivation! I dried and put away all the dishes. Then I cleaned the stove and counters. I also cleaned out the refrigerator and took out the garbage.

Now, all that wasn't in the first step. The first step was just the shiny sink. But gosh, when your sink is shiny, it makes you want to go that much further! Now my job is to dry out the sink whenever I use it. That's Day One. Day Two...well, you'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out!