An approach to housekeeping

I saw this on one of the homeschooling lists yesterday morning:

Our most successful tactic in joyful cleanup is to "do battle" with the clutter and dirt in a particular area. A sudden, conspiratorial whisper of "There's an enemy in the living room!" boosts the enthusiasm level right through the roof. I send them on a spy mission into the offending room, then they come back and report details of the mess and we make a battle plan (all in whispers, of course), gather our weapons (toy bins, wet wipes, dusters, or just our bare hands), and then ATTACK! It's loud and they run a lot and move fast, so it's best for quick decluttering jobs.

Amy in OH

I like this woman. I should be more like this woman.

And speaking of housekeeping, I'm KEEPING our house in better working order by just having it majorly insulated in the attic. It should save our roof from the awful ice damming that happened last year and did serious damage to our dining room ceiling which I haven't fixed yet because what's the point if it's going to happen again. Instead of insulating the floor more, they insulated the roof, which is far more expensive but far more effective. Here is the coolest picture of them spraying it in:



They did the entire attic, and even staple-gunned in a fire blanket (or so they call it) over the whole thing so now the attic looks almost finished. It looks actually nice. It makes me want to take a couple more hundred dollars and get Mikel the Ukrainian Fixit Guy to put up some drywall. The best thing is, whereas when it was 25 degrees outside it used to feel like maybe 30 in the attic, now it feels like 60 and there is no heating up there. The girls have been playing in it.

Of course, it can't all be good, right? So it seems now that the house sealing trapped a mouse in our dining room ceiling. Which died. Which you can smell from the dining room. I had Greg the Squirrel Guy in and he said, "Yep. That's something dead." He said I had the option of opening the ceiling and trying to take it out, or letting it be, and the smell would totally dissipate in about a week because of it being so cold and dry. He said thank goodness it's not summer.

I opted for the cheap way. And actually, the smell is less, and it's only the 4th day.

The good part of it is that I haven't heard any squirrels or other critters since then, which says to me that possibly (fingers crossed) all their Ways In are blocked and this stone house may once more house just Rosses.