House Cleaning: 5 Tips to Getting Your Home in Shape
The New Year is officially underway, and so are New Years Resolutions. Besides all of the New Year goals to lose weight and get in shape, it’s not uncommon to find resolutions to get the house in shape. Getting organized and managing the home more efficiently are both on my list of to-dos for 2011, but keeping on top of the house work can be as much effort as finding the motivation to exercise regularly. Both are, at the core, an issue of self-discipline and commitment.
I am not an expert in home management. While I could use some help being more organized, planning well-balanced meals, and teaching my kids to be more responsible around the house, I have discovered a few tips during my 14 years as a mom that have helped me stay on top of the more important things.
And tips were meant to be shared.
5 Tips to Staying on Top of House Cleaning
- Put things away. Every time you leave a room, carry one or two things with you that belong somewhere else. Don’t just move them. Put them away.
X - Schedule your cleaning. Make a list of cleaning tasks that you need to do daily, weekly, and monthly. And then put them on the calendar. If you need to mop the floor once a week, pick a day and stick with a schedule. Similarly, if a task needs to be repeated every day, find a time that works and keep to a schedule.
X - Assign “zones” to family members. This is one situation where having a big family pays big. Each person has an area or two of the house that they are responsible for. That doesn’t mean that one child is stuck cleaning the play room on their own, but it does mean that each family member is accountable. Everyone must take responsibility for keeping the house clean.
X - Reduce the clutter. Minimize what you have out in each room. Even when clutter is “organized” it still makes a room look messy. “Hide” toys in bins and on shelves, pick only your favorite photos and trinkets to display on shelves, and maximize on empty floor and wall space.
X - Organize! Keep the tools (cleaning supplies, brooms, rags, etc) where they are used. If you regularly need to clean the upstairs bathroom mirror it makes sense to store window cleaner in the bathroom. Buy another bottle for the kitchen, or anywhere else that window cleaner is used.
What are some of your tips for keeping your house in good shape?
Lolli is a mother of five who believes that kids can do more than they lead us to believe. So she puts her kids to work cleaning and cooking as much as possible, reassuring them the whole while that they will thank her for it someday. When the kids are at school, Lolli spends her time writing on her blog, Better in Bulk, tweeting, and editing pictures from her latest photo shoots.
I just started a major de-cluttering project and I love your ideas for keeping it clean. It’s amazing the amount of stuff we accumulated over the years. Most should have been donated or tossed years ago. But, better late than never. I now have all of this new space in my house to keep things organized. And like you say, if you can do a little cleaning every day, you won’t get stuck in my predicament.
Great ideas, Lolli! I love using bins for kids’ toys!
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I decided to do some deeper cleaning of my closet yesterday and found a long-lost bag of treasures. Seriously. Two camera straps that I’d payed $40 for and had thought were long gone were in this bag. I did the happy dance. It totally re-motivated me to clean MORE!
I have a large basement storage room…too big, really. I reorganized the storage room by moving items I never use but can’t bare to part with or want to keep for grandkids/my children to the back of the storage room. I now have a large area in the storage room to store overflow items from every room in the house. I recently moved a couple of vacuum cleaners, paint cans, old clothes, toys no longer played with, and a host of other items to the now-clear-of-stuff area in the storage room. Lest you think I am a complete and utter packrat I do have 8 garbage bags of stuff and a couple of ancient computers in the garage ready for AmVets/Purple Heart. Baby steps!
Love this, Lolli! I can get behind on those simple everyday tasks and this is a good reminder!
Clean using a system. Too many people just wing it when it comes to cleaning. We follow a system, or directions for almost everything else we do, so why is it that people don’t realize they could follow an actual system to for cleaning. You’ll cut your cleaning time in half using the Speed Cleaning System!
Learn to clean your home in HALF the time with Jeff Campbell’s best-selling book: Speed Cleaning. We have all the tools you’ll need to keep your home spotless, without spending the whole weekend on it. Learn Speed Cleaning. Someone gave me this tip nearly 25 years ago, and I’m still committed to it!