Annual Spring Cleaning

I realize that picture perfect posts can sometimes give a false picture that our lives are always sweet and rosy, in order and without any struggles... and often this is also what we feel about other people's posts.

Here is a picture of our everyday lives... a potpourri of both the fun and the mundane...

We didn't manage to do a thorough spring cleaning before Christmas. Today is a public holiday. Mr. FECS really have a desire to do a spring cleaning. So we used it do clean up the store room under the staircase. I woke up late around 10.15am, after staying up late for the New Year Eve yesterday. We had brunch. Mr. FECS made freshly baked buns. Then we did Chinese and piano, before we began our spring cleaning. We tried to make a competition to see who can find the most pile to stuff to give away or throw away, but that wasn't that successful. J did clean his little cabinet that he used for storing the crafts he made in school. We didn't have the time to make dinner, so we just made tomato soup with the Philip soup-maker and some bread with smoked salmon, lettuce and spinach... still rather healthy and nutritious, I hope.

Soon Our Little FECS (6Y8M27D) got bored, so I tried to occupied him with Lego and others:

We decided to work on the messy store room. We emptied out the store room into the living room. Here is a picture of our living room just as we started our spring cleaning. Amazing how it can fill the whole living room!!! We talked about moving to a bigger house, but we are trying to restraint ourselves. If we have a bigger house with a basement, most likely, we will just dump stuff that we don't use in the basement. It will be a very expensive "rubbish dump." It is better to just throw/give away all these stuff that take up space. And if we have a basement to clean up, it will certainly take us longer.

Here is how our storeroom looked like after being emptied out:

We started at 1pm, and we were done at 11.30pm - it took us almost a whole day to clean up. Here is how our storeroom looked like after cleaning up. It is amazing how the little storeroom under the staircase can contain!!! We really don't need to move to a big house with a basement for storage space. We just need to throw out or give away stuff that we don't use.

Here are the stuff we accumulated over the years to be given away:

It has been a very cosy day to spend our day, believe it or not. It is very relaxing just to be home, being together as a family, cleaning out stuff and feeling good after getting rid of all the clutter. We have made it our family tradition to do this. To be honest, I used to complain about using the whole precious day just on cleaning up, but I have come to appreciate it and see its value. And when Mr. FECS is happy, I find that I am very happy too. Thank God for a productive day. IT is nice to sit back and relax over a cup of tea, after all the cleaning and hard work, and things are spick and span. So this is the way we spent the first day of new year. Not very exciting to many others, but something we enjoy :-)