Lessons Learned From Planning and Completing a Big Home Project in Five Days

Tackling big home projects is always a chore. In fact, sometimes it takes a special event for me to get started on them.

Last week I wrote about how I got over the hurdle of deciding what to keep and what to get rid of when de-cluttering. I mentioned that we have our home for sale, and I needed to get it cleaned and de-cluttered for an upcoming open house.

Honestly I could have just gotten by with cleaning our home well. However, we’ve had our home on the market for 1 1/2 years. I thought it was time to step things up a notch even though we’ve never received any feedback saying our home was too cluttered.

I’ve had plans all this time to get rid of clutter just so we’d be ready to move only the things we wanted to keep. The de-cluttering process hasn’t happened as I’d planned, so I decided to take five days before the open house to tackle a few areas of our home that really needed work.

I showed these before pictures of my home office in my post on Friday.

This is what it looks like now.

Another area I worked on was the master bedroom closet. Specifically my side of the closet.

Here is the before pic.

And what it looks like now.

My son and daughter worked really hard in their rooms and closets as well. I don’t have pictures of those rooms because I respect their privacy. I have to share, though, that I am proud of their work. They got rid of a lot of items and cleaned out their closets well.

I learned a lot of lessons from planning and completing this big home project in five days. Let me share them with you.

Make a list (but not too big of one).

Obviously you need to decide what has to be done. Otherwise you will just run around doing tasks here and there and will never complete the project. Especially when you are short on time.

On Wednesday of last week I made a list on four sheets of notepaper with everything I could think of that needed to be done or that I wanted to do. I divided that list by different areas of my home.

Decide when each task needs to be completed.

There were tasks on my list such as dust and vacuum that really needed to wait until Saturday afternoon. If I completed those tasks on Wednesday, I would most likely have to do them again Saturday because our home would be dirty again just by living in it.
So, I looked at all of my tasks as well as responsibilities I had for the next few days and began assigning tasks to the days I thought would be best for completing them.

Realize that not everything on your list will get done.

I knew when I made my initial list that it was ambitious to say the least. However, I also knew if I didn’t at least write everything down, some of the tasks may never get done.

By mid-afternoon Saturday, I knew I was going to have to scale back some. This is what my list looked like for Saturday. It includes items that I was going to complete on Thursday or Friday but didn’t get to.

So, I quickly assessed what was left to do and made the decision to do only the tasks that really had to get done such as cleaning the bathrooms. I had tasks like going through my tote bags and purses and organizing the pantry on my initial lists. I realized that while it would be nice to have done those tasks, they were not necessary for the open house.

After all was said and done, I was able to accomplish so much more than I thought I could, thanks to help from my family. Even though it was stressful, I can now rest knowing that a ton of clutter is out of our home and everything looks neat and tidy (for the moment). I hope this reset will help us stay on top of clutter and our possessions so we’ll be able to show our home at any time without too much stress of having to clean up.