Pictures of Clean

This blog is pretty much a photo essay of the cleaning work that I have been doing these past several weeks.

For those of you who have not been to my house recently, these pictures may come as a shock. And for any of you who have never been to my house, here's your chance to be a voyeur.

These aren't all of the rooms in the house ~ just the cleanest ones. Some rooms more cluttered because most of the packed boxes are being stored there.

We'll start off with the most recent cleaning activity that took place in the kitchen yesterday.

Here's the pantry ~ all nice, neat, clean, and organized. Before yesterday, you could not even walk into the pantry. Now look at all that floor space.

The kitchen sink area hasn't looked this clean and uncluttered in ages.

This used to be the cupboard where I kept the medicines, first aid supplies, glue, nail polish and other finger nail stuff.

The polish and finger nail stuff are still kept in this cupboard. I also put in it the stuff that I had on the counter, thus making the counter less cluttered.

The lazy-Susan on the left was a royal mess, with sticky spills from honey. The spice cupboard on the right was also a mess ~ but not anymore.

Had I taken a "before" pic of this cupboard, you would have seen dishes, glasses, bowls, and cups crammed everywhere. All the random cups, glasses, and dinnerware made it tough to maintain any sense of order.

As you can see, I pared everything down to the bare essentials.

The tea and coffee cupboard is much neater too. There's no longer a layer of spilled coffee grounds on the bottom shelf.

This cupboard used to hold a lot of plastic food storage containers, countless jar lids, along with some of our meds, the animal meds, sea salt, macrobiotic seasonings, and a few sundry items.

Basically, it was a "catch-all" cupboard.

Now this cupboard mainly holds our meds, first aid stuff, vitamins, along with everything else except for the plastic food containers and tons of jar lids.

I had totally forgotten about the left cupboard because I never used it. But even so, it still required cleaning and organizing.

The lazy-Susan cupboard on the right was a mess with a multitude of bottles and jars, along with sticky spills from the olive oil can.

But now, everything is clean and organized.

Here's Ariana on her bed.

I didn't take a pic of Ariana's room because there is still more work that needs to be done on it. But believe me, it's a whole lot cleaner than it used to be. For one thing, you can see the color and pattern of the rug in the floor.

This view is looking from Ariana's room into my room and through to the other end of the house. (I thought this was a rather "artsy" photo composition.) You just can't see the other rooms because the lights aren't on in them.

This is what my room looked like after it was cleaned out this past Wednesday. There's Gomez up on my bed. The door to the right leads to Ariana's room. The door on the left is one of the tiny closets in my room.

This view is from standing in front of the door that leads to Ariana's room. The mirror that you see is on the door of another small closet. There is an even smaller third closet with shelves, but you can't see it because it is behind the door that leads out of my room.

Here's the same view as before, but a little brighter and without Gomez on the bed.

This is the west wall opposite my bed, looking towards Ariana's door. Note the sloped attic ceilings and the tiny windows just inches off the floor.

Here's that same wall, but from a different angle.

This is the sink in the laundry room. You can actually see the top of the counter.

Here's a peak into the bathroom that's off the laundry room. (The bathroom is to the right of the sink in the laundry room.) The bathroom used to be wallpapered before I painted its walls and ceiling.

Here's the living room. I know that I had a pic of it in a previous blog, but I could not resist taking another pic, but from a different angle. The blue walls look SO much better than the previous yucky wallpapered green walls.

This pic is of the foyer-entrance that's just before my studio.

The plant that you see is my Dracaena marginata. It used to reach the ceiling before I cut it down and rooted the cut sections, which I planted when I re-potted the plant. I had that plant since 1982. It'll be coming with me to Texas because that plant had lived through a lot of memories.

This room used to be Neil's room, which used to be the master bedroom. There are 2 large closets in this one, one of them being a huge walk-in closet.

Here's Neil's room from another angle. That open door leads into the walk-in closet.

This is the linen alcove. You can enter Neil's old room either through the linen alcove (through the door on the left) or through the door from the room at the top of the stairs.

This is the workout room after Ariana and Jeremiah cleaned it yesterday.

These stairs may not look clean. But if you had seen them before, you would have risked breaking your legs going up and down them because Ariana had all sorts of stuff on the stairs and the landing.

The chill room is no longer cluttered with furniture and the detritus of youth.

This is the chill room from another angle. That hand chair was a birthday present that I got for Ariana from Archie McPhee. So many people tried to buy that chair when we had the moving sale.

Here's another view of the chill room.

That door, by the way, is the loft door, or what Ariana calls, "the door that leads to nowhere." The chill room is on the second floor, and the door opens up to just plain air. There is no deck or set of steps outside the door. So the first step out is going to be a doozy.

The front porch also got cleaned. And it was much easier to clean after the moving sale was over.

One more view of the porch.

At another time, I will have to take pix of the rest of the rooms in the house, plus the storage area between the chill room and Ariana's room.

(And we still have not yet even attacked the garage.)

But given the fact that this is a very large house, we busted our butts and did a lot of work to get these decluttered, cleaned up, and organized.

And there will be even more butt-busting to come.