Have you ever noticed that an accidental mess or mistake can actually result in a cleaner, neater space? A kitchen floor dirty from daily use can long be ignored, in my house anyway. But spilled orange juice can’t. Left alone, it becomes a sticky ant magnet or worse. I can’t tell you how many times a child (or adult) in our home has spilled an entire glass of OJ or milk, prompting me to fly to the sink for a wet rag. After the spill is dealt with, that floor is considerably cleaner than it was before the accident!
Similarly, I recently knocked a semi-full, open container of Bare Minerals powder – the bronzer, no less – into an open drawer in my bathroom. The drawer contained various open bags of hair accessories, a first aid kit, and old medications. The powder snowed down and blanketed it all. I didn’t have time to deal with it at the time, but today I returned with a vacuum to address the issue.
As I was removing the powder, I realized I hadn’t really looked in those bags recently, or even in the past year. The hair accessories…those plastic headbands always give me a headache, so why do I have them? The first aid kit: the items that hadn’t been pilfered already had long ago expired. And those old medications were in a bag in that drawer, because I’d forgotten about them and had bought newer versions, which were now in the medicine cabinet where medications belong.
I added 5 minutes of cleanup time to purge the old stuff from this drawer. Thanks to the makeup powder mess, that drawer got a makeover!
