I’ve been working to clean out our basement this week. Because of some shoddy renovation work — well, shoddy cleanup — we had a fair amount of concrete dust coating many things as well as the usual chaos that comes with leaving your basement to grow its on labyrinth of apathetic misplacement of tools and storage bins for four years.

Monday and Tuesday I worked on the metal and wood storage shelves that hold our plastic storage bins filled with camping items, old photographs, clothes the Boy has not yet grown into, and mysterious “why do we still have that?” items. Wednesday was the work bench as well as a few more shelves. (Everything takes so long because each item — every single one — needs to be wiped down, and the shelves took a long time because I moved them to one location temporarily to clean them and then had to move them back.)

Today, I began working on the other half of the room and final touches to the work bench. The after picture, as a result of not having time to put everything back in its place, looks worse than the before picture above.

In order to clean a mess, we often have to make one first. It’s truism for most things in life, I think, but I often forget it. I want things to move ahead without ever moving back; I want lesson plans to come out perfect the first time; I want first drafts to be good enough to be final drafts; I want our kids to perfect things instantly. It’s in the mess that we figure things out, though, and making a masterpiece always involves a mess beforehand.

I forget that when I come into the kitchen as K is cooking, though. I tend to clean things as I go along; K, not so much. The kitchen is a complete wreck when she’s done cooking. Yet out of that mess comes little slices and ladles-full of perfection.