How to Maintain a Tidy Home
If you’ve done the hard work of purging and decluttering, the following five tips will help you maintain a tidy home.
So many books, blogs, and podcasts help audiences declutter their homes. It’s for good reason –too many people have too much stuff.
But clutter may not be the bane of your homemaking. Once you’ve worked your way through decluttering and purging your home of everything you don’t love or need, how can you care for your home to keep it tidy?
If you’ve done the hard work of purging and decluttering, the following five tips will help you maintain a tidy home.
How to Maintain a Tidy Home
1. Decide your priorities.
When you consider your priorities, decide what you absolutely need to do each day. Realize what is required of you – maybe it’s the time you need to work or time you need to spend with your family.
Once you’ve identified your main priorities, take some time to think about your three or four non-negotiable daily chores that will help your daily life run easier.
Also think about what non-essential things you’d like to do. You may not be able to do what you’d like to do every single day, but you can look for pockets of time throughout the week to pursue what interests you the most.
Once you know what you need and want to do, figure out when you’re going to accomplish everything. Decide when you can do everything you’ve prioritized. Write out your plan, if you need to – or set digital reminders to keep you on track.
2. Work on your priorities.
Now that you know what you want and need to do and now that you know exactly when you can work on everything, get to work. In the words of Nike, Just Do It. Eventually, as you settle into a rhythm, you’ll find yourself in a routine, And that’s a good thing!
3. Set aside a pick-up time each day.
One easy way to put things back where they belong is to set a specific time each day for picking up. It doesn’t have to be long – anywhere between 15 minutes and a half an hour should do the trick.
Set a timer and clean up as quickly as you can. Since you only need to clean what you’ve gotten out in the past day, your cleaning chores won’t be too difficult or time-consuming.
Since I’m not the only one creating a messy home, I make sure my family members help out. This can be as easy as everyone taking their belongings to their bedrooms during our daily pick-up, but it also can involve giving particular chores to everyone in the family. (My children are great at dusting and mopping. My husband enjoys vacuuming. And I don’t mind scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen.)
4. Plan on a Homemaking Reset Day every six weeks.
Even by picking up every day, your home still will need deep cleaned again. Closets will start to get cluttered, and cabinets and drawers will turn messy. It’s the unfortunate but realistic tension of keeping house.
After spending a couple months doing a major cleaning and decluttering project in my home, I noticed everything stayed fairly clean — for about six weeks. Then, little messes would start to accumulate. Closets and cupboards got disorganized again. Maintaining a clean home wasn’t so easy. Then I discovered the beauty of a Homemaking Reset Day.
By taking one day and clearing my schedule of everything, I was able to focus on getting my home in order again. I cleaned the messiest spots. Because my home had been clean, it only took a day to get everything else back in order again.
In your own home, know that as much as you’ll try, there will still come a time when you’ll need to stop and regroup. Plan for a Homemaking Reset Day. In doing that, you’ll be able to get things under control again.
5. Schedule seasonal deep cleaning chores.
Even with daily pick-ups and homemaking reset days every six weeks, my house still gets dirty. If I have the time, I try to dig in and deep clean my home every spring and falls. These are the times when I tackle my dirtiest, grimiest cleaning chores. And during the summer and winter I try to work on decluttering projects.
By deep cleaning throughout the year, my home isn’t so dirty and my deep cleaning job doesn’t take so long. And by setting aside certain times of your day and year for maintenance cleaning, it’s easier to keep your home picked up … and keep everything nice and clean.
When planning for seasonal cleaning, you’re tackling bigger projects around your home — but by working on them three or four times a year instead of only once a year, there’s less cleaning that actually needs done. In other words, you won’t need as much elbow grease (or time) when you work on these projects three or four times a year!
You may only want to plan on two or three seasonal deep cleans each year instead of four. But whatever you prefer, make sure to look at your calendar when you’re planning your seasonal chores and use your schedule to your advantage. If you know you’ll be entertaining in your home at a certain time, try to work on your seasonal cleaning jobs beforehand so you can have your home cleaned.
By deciding your priorities and then making time, you’ll be able to pick up your small messes every day, plan for a productive Homemaking Reset Day every six weeks, and dig into some deep cleaning every few months. As you get into a rhythm of cleaning more frequently, your house won’t get out of control and you’ll end up spending far less time and energy maintaining your tidy home!
What comes easiest for you … picking up every night? Taking care of messes every couple months? Or deep cleaning throughout the year?
Photos courtesy of Lightstock and Unsplash.
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