Doing, Not Just Pinning: Last Week of June

June was a bear of busyness for me. I worked the Sonlight booth at two conventions on back-to-back weeks this year, Anaheim and Phoenix, and then the day after I get back our church's Vacation Bible School started. This week was my first chance to get stuff done around the house in almost a month, but it's also the first week my husband started a new old job (rehired for a job he worked at over a year ago). Busy, I tell you.

Anyway, in addition to summer cleaning (see foot note) and organizing for our new homeschool year that starts in July, I've decided that I've done way too much pinning to Pinterest lately and not nearly enough doing of what I have pinned. I've set myself a goal to do something I've pinned each week from now through the end of August, as life gets busy again for me come September when Home Educators of Yuma, the local support group that I am vice president of, starts up again.

For this first week of my self-imposed challenge, a week still full of chores relating to me being away from home for more days than all the rest of the year combined, I chose an easy pin that I knew I could whip out in just a bit of time. I pinned this tutorial for Reusable Swiffer Duster Cloths well over a year ago, and today I finally made some. I made just one little change to the tutorial in order to work with my needs and I am pleased as punch with the result. This is definitely a Pin Win.

I used a green fabric marker to color the opening where the wand slides in. All those layers made it a bit confusing where to put the wand, and my kids love to Swiffer (something about the wand, I think) so this removes the confusion for them. Green for "Go here."

 

As you can see below, we've already used one. It isn't as fluffy as the finished photo on the tutorial, but that's because I haven't washed them yet. My flannel was already prewashed, so I felt no need to wash my dusters before using them. Obviously they work great.

I made four of them, because we don't dust a bit at a time but rather dust lots at one time and then not again for a good while. I wanted to be sure to have enough to do a boat load of dusting all at once (like the two or three times a year we dust all seven ceiling fans in one day).

Now I don't have to say, "No," when my six year old asks to dust just because I don't want to waste the throw-away Swiffers. I have this thing about starting high and working down when it comes to dusting, and my six year old can't reach what I consider high even with a step stool. Now I can say, "Yes, go for it," and let her dust to her short little heart's content, and can just do all the low stuff again whenever I get around to doing the high.

Foot note: We don't do spring cleaning down here in the desert, because we keep our windows and doors open all winter and spring. It just doesn't make sense to do deep cleaning and hard to reach dusting and vacuuming when at any moment a dust storm will blow in and ruin all that work. Rather, we do summer cleaning and fall cleaning. Summer cleaning when we finally shut up the house for good once we have to run the A/C around the clock, and fall cleaning when we opening the house back up again. Mind you, I'm talking about deep cleaning here. We do regular cleaning a bit more than twice a year, I promise.