How to get girls to do chores!

For Christmas one of Bob's gifts was to have her room redecorated. To this end she actually "cleaned" her room. Her room is very cluttered so her definition of clean and mine are never the same. We're working on it though.

So today she came to me with her thoughts on how she wants her room painted. Night - with stars and horses. I told her she could ask Bear - the rule is no more than one wall could be painted dark, and NO black. Since one of her walls is already a fairly dark blue, that was the best she was going to get. Back to the drawing board! *grin*

We discussed what her room needs in order to be ready to paint. Since she wants to take out the two twin beds in her room and have some more book shelf space, we have decided that she will use the extra bed with a bookshelf built in that was dumped in the playroom when Ponito got his new bunkbed last month. This means that it has to be cleaned off (it became a storage facility quickly!) and both beds in her room need to be stripped and ready for storage in the garage.

{*sigh* We have a 3 car garage that is overstuffed with items for the garage sale we are having "someday" as well as all the usual junk a big family of pack rats accumulates. Bear's Christmas gift to us, the only one he gave anyone, was that he neatened the garage. It looks great! You could almost fit an actual car in there. Of course his solution to storage was just to pile everything in one huge, well-stacked, pile on one side of the garage. So it is all hopelessly mixed together and inaccessible. *deeper sigh*}

I finally just gave her a list.
1. Clean off bed in playroom. Make sure all stuff on it finds a home and is not just dumped on the floor! (HA! Thought you'd get me with that one! Mom knows what your 12 year old brain was planning!)
2. Put away everything on all surfaces.
3. Find a home for all stuff on the floor (boxes, laundry baskets, etc.)
4. Ask someone to help you move beds.
5. Take everything off the walls and doors. (All her walls are covered floor to ceiling in posters, pictures, calendar pages, junk).

Kitty wants a neighborhood girl to come over (she's kind of friends with both girls and went to school with them when they attended public school still). Truthfully I think that Kitty is too dysregulated for a sleepover, but I decided she could if the girls got the house looking presentable enough for company (sneaky Mommy trick).

Now Kitty is cleaning her room (chores!) so that her friend might possibly get to come over (I told her her room smelled too much and there were dirty clothes all over the floor). I also told them the playroom has to be cleaned up (today's chore!). Bob is working on this (hopefully with Kitty's assistance), because Bob needs a piece of furniture out of the playroom to go in her room. Kitty is mostly finished with her room, has a load of laundry going and is taking a break before she helps Bob. Bob has already cleaned off the new bed in the playroom and is now working in her room.