Surprise Visits - Tidiness
The first question I asked myself to get prepared for surprise visits was:
How prepared do I want to be?
For how many people would I want to be prepared?
How long should they be able to stay without problems?
My answers to those questions were:
I want to be able to receive guests like family or friends at any time, with just one hour of notice beforehand. I want to be prepared for three people to stay until late evening or even the next morning, without having to think about things like what we’ll eat, or were they’ll stay, or how tidy my apartment is at the moment.
First challenge: Tidying up!
I’m a messy person. Having a designated place for everything in my apartment helped for sure, but I still struggle to put everything back while working on a bigger project or multitasking many things at the same time.
The solution? A night time routine!
Every evening before going to bed, I’m going to put things back into their places. But not everything, because that would definitely be too much of a hassle for a tired, exhausted me. I called my method ‘‘Controlled Chaos’‘.
Even as I child, I tended to clutter spaces up, and I noticed that just moving the clutter into one part of the room and creating a free space framing the clutter, helped create the illusion of tidiness.
I’m gonna illustrate this with my living room as an example:
First, I identified all relevant surfaces.
That’s how they normally look on a day-to-day basis.
Then I looked at the floor space that really needs to be cleared, not only to control the chaos and fake tidiness, but also to reduce the risk of accidents in daily life. I don’t want to stumble over my beloved floor pillow while carrying a heavy bag of soil out onto the balcony.
Those are obstacles I should remove not only at night during my routine, but every time I see them during the day.
In case of an emergency where I have to leave the house quickly, possibly after scrambling to get my necessities together in just a short amount of time, my future self would probably be thankful for organized rooms without dangerous obstacles.
Lastly, I identified the surface on tables and such that need to be cleared each evening by either putting things back into their designated spaces, or cluttering them in special clutter zones to be organized at a later time.
The white zones I forgot to explain on the sketch are filled with deco articles and are therefore irrelevant for my tiding up night routine.
I repeated those steps for every room, and already started implementing this night time routine into my daily life. It’s not as long as I feared it would be, and it’s pretty flexible time wise, as I get to decide if I want to return everything to it’s place, or just pile it up neatly in the next clutter zone. My apartment certainly looks nicer, the biggest difference being my small kitchen.
I’m pretty sure that one hour would be enough to clean my living room in case of an surprising visit and i feel slightly better prepared for an emergency were I would have to leave the house quickly, so success!
Next up will be the Surprise Visits - Food question.
