Memories Monday - Cleaning and Organizing

Since I've been in the "cleaning and organizing" mode lately, it's brought back memories of when I was little with my mom.

Growing up, we lived in a 1 bedroom duplex. My mom was a single mom and so that was basically all she could afford, but thank goodness it had a front yard and the people she rented it from owned the property and lived in the back attached house. That's partly why it only had one bedroom, they took one of the bedrooms from the front out, closed up the doorway and made one to their side. They had 3 kids, 2 boys and a girl, so they needed the extra bedroom.

Anyway. So we only had one bedroom. At the time we moved in it was just me and my one younger sister. (My baby sister didn't come until about 3 years later) My mom had me and my sister take the bedroom and she slept in the living room on a twin bed on one side of the living room. Later on in years she would get a sofa sleeper so she could have a bed, yet hide it during the day.

Since we did live in such a fairly small place, storage was very limited. It was amazing the things that my mom came up with to store things though. And she would get "bored" with how things looked so probably at least once a year, the living room would get rearranged, or our bedroom would.

Saturdays were usually her cleaning days since she worked all week long. With her Budweiser in hand, she went from room to room on Saturdays. She would have her music playing and just be in this "groove" of cleaning and organizing. I always found that day to be fascinating. I don't know why. Because my mom was in the house all day? I don't know. Thank goodness though the job my mom had, had good hours. She worked in a bank and back then when I was growing up, they did have true banking hours.

Some of the things she did, I still do to this day, maybe because of habit. Our games were stored in the linen closet in the hallway and yes, mine are there too. Cereal was always stored up on top of the refrigerator, and yes, mine is there too. Hubby can't stand the cereal being on top of there, but when it's something I've done my whole life, to me, it's normal to have it there. Maybe one day when we can expand the shelves in our pantry, I can put them there.