In May, we bought a new bed for our anniversary. We upgraded from a queen sized to a king, thus rendering all of our sheets, comforters and quilts useless. I had some bedding picked out that I loved, but it wasn’t available yet, so I decided to wait until it was released. When it became available I discovered it was going to be over $700! (far too much than I wanted/am willing to spend on new bedding.) So the search began for bedding that I loved. Until then, we bought some inexpensive sheets and used a pile of blankets, or just the fitted sheet and nothing else because it was summer, and I was pregnant.

As fall descended upon us, I realized we needed new bedding because it was soon going to be necessary to use more than just a sheet. And since I am no longer pregnant, I don’t have any sort of built in heater and I really need a comforter. So the search became more intense.

Searching online and in stores, I finally found one that I loved at JC Penney – awesome (and it was on sale — double awesome) – and made my purchase. When it arrived I was so excited. I wanted to put it on my bed that day, but didn’t have any sheets that matched (it is a 10 piece bed set with a comforter, 4 decorative pillows, two king shams, two euro shams and a bed skirt, but no sheets) and needed to make a trip to the store.

Finally, I had everything that I needed and was ready to make my room beautiful once again. I wanted it to look like the picture, so I even pulled out the ironing board (don’t even ask me the last time I pulled out the ironing board. I can’t remember. We never iron anything around here, so getting the ironing board out is a big deal).

Turns out, I don’t iron because I don’t know how or am just not good at it.

I started with the bed skirt. It was really wrinkly from being folded up in the bag, so I read the instructions and set the iron on low according to the care instructions. It is a type of fabric I’m not familiar with, so I didn’t want to burn or melt it. I’ve done that before with the iron.

I sprayed the bed skirt and ran the iron over it. Nothing happened. I tried again and the wrinkles persisted. I thought maybe I needed to let the iron warm up more, so I took a short break then tried again. The wrinkles wouldn’t budge. Sprayed it again and tried more. Still nothing.

Fine. The bed skirt wouldn’t be ironed. No one would see the wrinkles in it anyway.

Then I realized I needed to move the mattress to put on the bed skirt… hmmm. It’s pretty heavy and Bryan wasn’t home, but I’m tough and knew I could do it. I lifted and pushed aiming for the bedroom wall. Pushing, lifting, grunting and crawling across the box springs I finally got it propped up against the wall and set to put the bed skirt over the box springs. After I had it all positioned I just needed to put the mattress back. Placing the mattress back on would be far easier than lifting it off, so why not rotate the mattress at the same time. It’s good to rotate mattresses every once in a while, right? Right, but probably not when you are trying to put on a bed skirt.

In the process of lining the mattress up with the box springs and rotating it, there was only inches of the bed skirt left showing on either side of the mattress.

just a smig

inches...

I tugged, pulled, lifted, tucked and tried everything to pull the rest of the bed skirt out. Then gave up.

There is currently a bed skirt on  my bed, but if you look, you won’t see it because I gave up just tucked the whole thing between the mattresses. Who needs a bed skirt anyway?

Then it was on to the sheets. I had washed them the night before and left them in the dryer, so they were pretty wrinkled too. Still having high hopes of the bed looking just like the picture I thought I would iron the sheets too. But not all of them. That would be way too much. Not the fitted sheet and only the top part of the flat sheet that you see at the top of the bed.

I knew I could turn the iron much hotter for sheets (we were taught how to iron by ironing pillow cases when we were younger) and knew that I could get the wrinkles out of sheets. At the top of the sheets the is a fold in the fabric and a decorative element, but the problem was that the sheets aren’t the highest quality and I’m not sure the decorative element and fold were quite alined when they were sowed, so I ended up ironing creases into the sheets (I’m sticking with the sheets were defective and not that I just am terrible at ironing).

Finally finishing, I ironed the pillow cases and set to work putting the whole bed together.

The finished product!

(Please excuse all the random junk on my nightstand. I refuse to get out of bed at night when I feed the baby, so everything I need is within arms’ reach.)

At this point, even though it was snowing outside and we hadn’t turned on our heater yet, I was sweating. But I love how it turned out and I love the colors in our bedroom and it so warm and wonderful. There are a couple too many pillows, and I knew Bryan would mock me for that, but after moving the euro pillows to the family room (the two in the very back) it doesn’t seem so over-pillowed and silly and I love love love it.

I’m still a little sad about the crazy $700 bedding, but I am so happy with the final product that this really was worth the wait.

Next: on to adding a cool accent wall behind the bed, with paintable wallpaper, a shelf and blue paint. It’s gonna be awesome.

Tonight when my handsome, handsome husband and I came home from work, we decided it was probably time to do the dishes (sadly, we don’t do the dishes as often as we should, because there is only two of us, and we don’t make that many dirty dishes so we wait until we have more to do.  By time that happen though, we have a huge pile.).  So we went in the kitchen and got to work.  Then, I guess we got in the mood and our kitchen cleaning turned into entire main level cleaning, which then turned to master bedroom cleaning and ironing.  It was a very productive evening.

While I was cleaning tonight though, I was thinking a lot about the cleaning as I did as a child.

I am very thankful that as a kid, my mom made sure we always had jobs to do and she taught me how to clean.

Tonight, I was vacuuming the living room and I remember as a kid when we had to vacuum the living room, my mom insisted that we move the piano bench out of the way and vacuum everything.  So now, when I vacuum the living room, I make sure and move our ottoman so I can vacuum everything and not just around things (I don’t move our love sac out of the way often enough though, it’s a pain to move).

Then, when I was dusting, I moved everything off the end table and bookshelf and dusted the surfaces while they were empty.  Then as I put the items back in their places, I ran my dust rag over then to make sure they were also dustless like the shelves they sat on.  This practice was also something we were instructed to do when dusting the piano when we were little.

Another thing my mom taught us to do when we cleaned that I still do is after loading the dishwasher, you rinse out the sink and faucet.  Then dry the inside of the sink and buff faucet so there are no water spots.

While I know these type of things are standard things that people do when they clean and I complained about when I was little, looking back now, I’m so thankful that my mom taught me these things and got me in the habit.  I know sometimes when I am being lazy in my cleaning and don’t move the things when I dust or something like that, it’s never really the same.

One thing that my mom did though and taught us, that I DO NOT follow her lead is ironing.  (Her method is better than mine, but I hate it so much, that I just can’t do it).

My mom irons like this: when she does laundry, if there is something that needs ironing, she puts it in “the ironing basket.”  This included all kinds of things, like my dad’s dress shirts, polos, her shirts, our shirts, pants, pillowcases, table cloths and sometimes even sheets.  Often, one of our jobs for the week was to iron 5 things — not a lot, but considering how much I hate it, it was torture.  We would sift through the basket to find the pillowcases and table cloths.  If you were one of the first to do your 5 things, you could normally get away with only having to iron the easy things.  After the pillowcases and the table cloths the next easiest would be shirts not belonging to my dad (so mom’s t shirts or one of the kids shirts).  Then if you had to, you’d move on to dad’s polos.  Then if you were really unlucky, you’d end up with dad’s dress shirts.  Which were just such a pain because they were hard to iron and if we did a bad job, dad wouldn’t look nice and he was a CIO and needed to look nice. After we did our 5 things, mom would finish the rest.  Now, this system was a great system for my family.  It helped us learn how to iron (even though we didn’t want to) and we had lots of really nicely pressed things in our house (pillows do look nicer on beds after they have been ironed. Try it if you’ve never done it).  Don’t get me wrong, our system had some flaws, but we won’t go into that.

So if I don’t follow my mom’s system, what’s my super awesome ironing system, you may ask?  I don’t have one.  I hate the chore so much that I would rather wear wrinkled clothes than have to iron.  This isn’t a problem for me, because I’ve come to terms with it.  It is a little bit of a problem for Bryan though, because his Sunday clothes really do need to be ironed.  The system is probably something I should try to adopt from my mom, but it’s just so hard. For a good portion of our marriage so far we didn’t even have an ironing board. My cousin Brandon and his family came to stay with us once and he was amazed that I didn’t have an ironing board.

So here’s my question to you.  How do you iron? How do you make sure everything that needs to be ironed gets ironed? And it gets done in a timely manner?

I know part of my problem with it is my attitude, but still, there has to be a way to do it that makes it less horrible, or maybe not less horrible, but so that my husband can look nice (because really, even with a good system, I’ll still only do my hubby’s clothes so he looks nice and I don’t feel like a horrible wife). He’s pretty awesome and deserves a nicely pressed shirt.

( ha ha! That turned out to be a really long article about cleaning. Wow.)