Comments on: Left to Right

By: sandi

sandi — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:34:00 +0000

I LOVE this picture! Our living room looked like that…and as soon as everyone left to go back to their own houses, we were so tired that we took ourselves to bed. It had been dark for hours and hours, but as I reached over to turn off the light, I caught a glimpse of the clock and it was only six-fifteen. In the evening. I had to ask myself if it wasn’t really six-fifteen in the morning. The next day I had to pick up most of the treasures and mail them to people who had left things behind. Overnight mail, yet. If I had just taught them all to clean from left to right when they were little…none of that standing in line and mailing after Christmas would have had to take place.

By: openpalm

openpalm — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:42:36 +0000

…but I want to lie on the dog bed!

By: charlotteotter

charlotteotter — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:58:28 +0000

Happy New Year, BlogLily. I love that your sitting-room looks like ours did on Christmas morning. Rewards, music and returning objects to their places are all good tips for making cleaning more of a pleasure than it deserves to be.

By: mari

mari — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:42:39 +0000

Never leaving the room with something in your hands is something I practice and it works! That doesn’t mean my house is necessarily neat…Happy New Year, bloglily. You’re lovely. m

By: LK

LK — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:37:10 +0000

It looks like absolute fun chaos! I ADORE the sleeping dog in the middle of the pile.

Happy New Year to you and yours, BL!

By: eoinpurcell

eoinpurcell — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:12:20 +0000

BL,

What an excellent picture! Love it! And the left to right cleaning sounds inspired! My cleaning is always full of good intention and ends with more ordered piles of paper and books!

Hope the New Year treats you fantastically!
Eoin

By: litlove

litlove — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:37:30 +0000

Loved the photo, and yup, ours looked a lot like that. To be brutally honest, it still looks like that. I’ve just closed the door on it and moved into another room and left the boys to their gerbil cage existence. They truly do not seem to notice. I like the left to right cleaning principle. I tend to clean in small bursts as more than 10 minutes depresses me, and if one corner of any given room looks ok, well, you can just look at that bit, can’t you? The point of all this rambling is really to say a Very Happy New Year to you, dear Bloglily! Here’s to much more sharing of the madness that is family life and the joy that is sharing travels in the book world!

By: Joe Felso

Joe Felso — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:45:20 +0000

I this household, music is the key. We clean like nanobots. We put something rousing on, and everyone has to be in motion until some number of songs passes. Somehow almost everything migrates back to its proper spot and the house is straighter (even if the real cleaning remains). I’ve never worked left to right or right to left, but I’ll try it…after something less than 6 cups of coffee.

By: Dark Orpheus

Dark Orpheus — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 09:56:13 +0000

I don’t get it: What’s wrong with the living room? Looks just fine to me. ;p

By: Ann Darnton

Ann Darnton — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 09:13:18 +0000

Happy New Year Blog Lily. I hope the year to come offers you many moments when you can imitate Archie.

By: Kate S.

Kate S. — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:31:04 +0000

It all sounds like excellent advice. Happy New Year Bloglily!

By: Cam

Cam — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:11:24 +0000

I agree with YogaMum — the dog has the right idea! Wish that could have been my day today, but alas, I had to — eeks! work!. Get Friday off for good behavior provided there aren’t random bits & bytes of data flying all over the office. I take immense pleasure in realizing that others houses sometimes look like mine. Afraid I’ll never get the Left-to-right technique down, though. I’ll be striving this year to do one thing at a time for short periods of time. Eventually, I’ll clear away the debris without doing an archeological dig.

By: yogamum

yogamum — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:31:41 +0000

Will you come teach my husband? He frequently picks things up to “put away” and then just puts them back down in some random place, which drives me absolutely batty.

I think the dog has the right idea.

By: Ingrid

Ingrid — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:23:14 +0000

I wish you a year filled with joy and laughter, new adventures and exitement and a lot of love, actually!

By: lucette

lucette — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:01:48 +0000

I embrace the left-to-right principle, and I often start off this way. But I am eminently distractrable, and often get off track in the middle.
Happy New Year!