In Every Thing Give Thanks

[ashlex]

One of the lessons God has been working on teaching me over the past year is to remember (and obey) 1 Thess. 5:18 In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

So, in the spirit of that text, here are some things about living in a small house that I've found to be thankful for:

• I can vacuum each entire level w/o changing electrical outlets. I even went ahead & vacuumed the kitchen w/ the Dyson instead of using my little rechargeable because it was easier to just keep going. It's amazing how quickly I can vacuum the whole house now, woo-hoo!
• I don't know if I've mentioned it here before or not, but we use cloth wipes instead of TP (for pee). One of the things that frustrated me about the whole system was trying to figure out how many wipes to put in each bathroom so that one bathroom didn't run out before the others. Now I only have one bathroom, no need to divide them up :)
  
• I posted awhile back about the whole zone cleaning thing I'd set up. It occurred to me that I'd need to "tweak" that for a new house. And then when I sat down to do it, I realized that smaller house means smaller zones! I wanted to stick with 8 zones because somehow for me doing it every 2 months is more . . . routine" than if I was on a 6 week cycle. So that means that my zones are as follows:
• Living Room & Entry
• Kitchen
• Master Bedroom
• Dining Room
• Bathroom (that's right, all by itself! Though there's a furnace room/storage closet off the bathroom so some months I may declutter the boxes that are stored in there as part of that zone)
• Basement/Laundry/Storage Building (storage building won't be cleaned, but I'll use this zone to purge & organize it sometimes
• Playroom/Hall Closet
• Girls' Room
• Every nook and cranny of the house is utilized space. I love that!