The Five Phases of Spring Cleaning

I recently realized the five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – were the exact same phases we experienced in the spring cleaning on steroids process at our house over the past few weeks:

Denial: There is no way our house has become this destroyed and disorganized in the process of trying to make it a better place to live. How did we end up with seven dustpans but only one broom? We can't have ten bikes, we only have two children. I know I didn’t buy and/or save (insert any random item here that no house would ever need).  We can't possibly have five storage totes of fall decorations and twelve Christmas trees of varying sizes and shapes.

Anger: Why did we ever start this process in the first place?! Did we really need to reorganize every single room and closet in the house, AND clean the garage and the basement?! Have we ever heard of pacing, for God’s sake?! Oh, and let’s not forget all the landscaping outside and preparing for the garage sale…do we need to put price stickers on ALL this crap?! And who the hell put (insert random object) at the bottom of the basement stairs where someone can trip over it?

Bargaining: Okay, let’s just take a moment and breathe. It’s not like “House Beautiful” is coming over for a photo shoot AND bringing Martha Stewart AND the producers from “Hoarders: Buried Alive.” We’ll just take on this monumental list of tasks one at a time until we are finished just in time for the fourth of July weekend. It will all get done in due time, and no one is going to die (yet) if we don’t finish everything all at once.

Depression: We will never be done. Every time I cross something off the master list, I open a box or a crate and it adds three more things to the list. Every single thing I touch turns into another project. Can we ever really be expected to keep a perfectly clean house with two active kids who host innumerable sleepovers and keep creating laundry and dirty dishes, a home-based business with way too much paper and not enough storage, two hairy black cats and a hairy black dog with white tile flooring across half of the first floor? We’re doomed to failure.

Acceptance:  We will eventually finish all items on our master list, and we will get everything back in order. And the second we cross the last item off our list, a myriad of new projects will pop up and we’ll start a new list. That’s just our way of life, just like everyone else’s. We can’t expect to finish everything on the crazy timetable we originally set for ourselves. Our house will never be 100% perfect because it is not a house, not a museum, it is our home. 

And that’s exactly the way we like it.