How to Have a Clean (enough) Home

Reading time:  Approximately 4 minutes

Years ago, on the inside of the bathroom medicine cabinets, I hung a daily task checklist designed to keep our bathrooms clean. (We had four kids).  The checklist served only one purpose; to make me feel like a failure.  Maintaining a clean enough home shouldn’t be so difficult.  Finally, I threw the list in the garbage.

 

So, how do you have a clean enough home?

(At least clean enough for you)

Unless your sole focus is house cleaning, please realize that the average person is not able to do everything all the time.  No matter how many little checklists you utilize, the reality is that there is just a lot more to life than cleaning house.

For a clean (enough) home, commit to a ridiculously small list of three daily household chores.    

By committing to the following three daily tasks, you will be surprised at how much easier it is to keep your house clean enough.

Note:  This is NOT going to give you an immaculate home.  Immaculate has never been my priority.  This will help you to have a clean enough, most of the time, home.

 

The Kitchen

Having a clean kitchen is the main priority in having a clean home.

Typically, the kitchen is the hub of the home.  When you wake up in the morning with yesterday’s dishes stacked in the sink, you automatically dedicate some of today’s precious time to yesterday’s mess.

Having to scrape off and wash dishes before you can even use them invites an atmosphere of chaos into your home.

Commit to having the cleanest, most clutter free kitchen possible.

Make it a habit to clean as you cook, to put things away after using them, and make it a priority to completely clean the kitchen before going to bed.  Most nights, I really don’t want to clean the kitchen.  But every time I make myself follow through, the next morning the time spent is so worth it.

If the kitchen is such a disaster you don’t really know where to begin, start with one counter top. 

The whole living by littles lifestyle started for me with a totally wrecked kitchen.

If you are interested in that part of the story, visit my “About“ page.  Scroll to the section:   How it Started

 

The laundry

I know it’s not true, but I swear, laundry breeds.  You put five things in the hamper and when you return to the laundry room, those five things have morphed into twenty-five things.

The second thing to which you should commit daily is one load of laundry.

Every.  Single.  Day.  Washed, dried and put away.  Dumping them in the Pack and Play is not an option.  That thing fills up way too quickly.

Once laundry piles up, it becomes an enormous time suck to correct. 

 

Note:  Since publishing this post, I have actually found a laundry routine that works better for me:

Ditch the one-load-per-day laundry routine

 

 

Have a designated pick up time

Our family calls it “The Fifteen Minute Run Through“

The key concept is that one time per day, usually at the end of the day, everyone participates in a run through of the main areas of the home and everything laying out is picked up and put away where it belongs.   Including bedrooms is optional.  Older kids really can and should be responsible for their own rooms.

 

Three daily tasks that lay the foundation of a clean enough home. 

It sounds easy.  Honestly, it’s not always.

Throw out the daily checklists and schedules that make you feel like a failure.  Commit to three daily tasks.

You will be surprised at how much easier and quicker it becomes to clean the rest of the house once you have the foundation of a clean home in place.

And when you get behind, and you will, remember, it is not a fail.  It is life.    Wake up the next morning and start over.  One day you will wake up and the kitchen will be clean, the laundry won’t be stacked to the ceiling and you won’t trip over any Legos.  On that day you will realize you might be on to something!

Just think, three things daily to a clean enough home!

 

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