home & garden: Post-Thanksgiving housecleaning tips, from top to bottom

For many of us, Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. We cite the reasons: we focus on family not gifts, we play football for that one time per year, we allow ourselves to overeat, we’re not exhausted from the “holiday season” yet…. And, there’s nothing much better than the leftovers; pure comfort--turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey hash, turkey tetrazzini.

Of course, the chaos is about to begin. If you can resist getting sucked right in to your next holiday, do yourself a favor and get on top of some minor household cleanup tasks before December gets here.

Staring at a messy house—you’ve used dishes you rarely use, you might have had houseguests staying, you have utilized every last piece of Tupperware. “Get ahead? Ya, right,” you say. If you break it all in to “manageable chunks”, you can and you will!

We call this the “One Drawer at a Time” method of household and time management.

First step: think about what room needs it most. Usually it’s your kitchen. (Bedroom closets and home offices are usually in a close tie for second place...but we won't tackle those until the new year!) In the kitchen then, what needs it worse, your refrigerator or your pantry? I actually tackled and overhauled my pantry earlier this month—I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Second step: just do it.

If you're throwing out the old leftovers (if there are any left!) from the fridge, wipe down your shelves with white vinegar. It helps prevent mildew and leaves a fresh scent behind.

You can use some glycerin to wipe frozen spills out of your freezer.

And, how many “junk drawers” do you have? I have three, I’ll admit it, even though I should only have one. No, they’re not clean at the moment, but that’s my promise to myself before the weekend is out. Otherwise, it’ll be March before I think about it again. If I clean one drawer per day starting Friday, by Sunday they’ll be like new—that’s doable, isn’t it?

Be sure to enlist the help of your guests. Two sets of hands are better than one and you can make it fun. You can chit-chat with you Aunt Susie or talk politics with your father-in-law while you clean out your fridge or tackle that junk drawer.

This is also a good way to role model good clean-up behavior with your young kids—there is nothing wrong with saying “We’ve had fun, made a bit of a mess, can we clean up together?”

* Don’t forget to sing the Barney “Clean Up” song while you do it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sarah Nicoli is co-founder and owner of dotmine dayplanners, the fashion meets function dayplanners™, based in Ann Arbor. For the past 16 years, she’s learned a whole lot about household and time management from her best teachers—her kids, her dogs and her customers. She can be reached at snicoli@timemine.com.