Homestead Update: Project Fridays

Hello all! I’m particularly filled with joy this Friday as I just got the entire family to help me deep clean the kitchen!

The kitchen. The heart of the home, my sanctuary, my mission field.

We spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Or kitchen adjacent. Our main room is one giant open space (thanks to strategic kitchen renos) that we use for just about everything but sleeping. We school at the table, I have my morning quiet time, our afternoon tea time, our family read-aloud and worship times, blanket time, meal time- you get the idea- a whole lot of time is spent in the main room. Naturally, that much life produces by-products and waste. Garbage, dirt, dishes, food mess, dog hair- ugh the dog hair- and it has taken me 6 years and 6 months to get to a place of being organized and disciplined enough in my homemaking and mothering to establish what we refer to as “Project Fridays” as the means by which we accomplish all the tasks that have been neglected and ignored in the season of drastic job change and postpartum season.

For project Fridays, I pick a zone (those of you familiar with the Fly Lady will know what I’m talking about) and I determine what project desperately needs to be accomplished in that space. Because our home is a fixer-upper, that’s pretty well every single square foot of the house. But- I narrow my focus for the sake of incremental progress. I write out my goals, tasks, materials needed, and then on Friday morning, because we do 4-day homeschool weeks, we have a big late-ish breakfast at 8:15, and we get going on our project by 9:00am.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve detailed the family van, cleaned out the garage…

boxed up out of season clothes…

Tamed my upstairs yarn stash/knitting area…

…and tackled laundry mountain.

This week, we had the help of my handsome husband who hung a huge beautiful mirror in the kitchen that we’ve actually had for MONTHS but haven’t had the bandwidth to get it hung.

The children sprayed and wipes the cabinets, we cleaned and conditioned the butcher block counters, and wiped down all the things that sit on the countertops.

I freshened up my recipe books, the light switch plate cover, washed the towels and rugs, and completely cleaned out the refrigerator.

We are baby stepping ever closer to my dream kitchen.

Everything got a good scrub down today. And it is lovely to have such a clean and orderly space in which to serve my family. Little by little, our house is feeling less like a house we bought and more like a home. My home. Our home.

At the same time I feel such joy and contentment in my home, there’s also a persistent longing for permanence and a hunger for more lasting beauty and comfort that reminds me I will never truly be at home in this world. I will continue to do my level best to bring God glory in keeping my home, improving, decorating, ordering, tidying, and managing it so as to cultivate an environment of rich family culture where we can all sense the goodness, beauty, truth, and goodness of God and draw ever closer to Jesus Christ.

That is the goal of my homemaking – to see God glorified, and for my family to know Him.

Come, Lord Jesus!