Habits to Maintain a Mostly Clean Home (with Children)
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Let’s face it, when you have small children, your home will temporarily be “mostly” clean, at best. Though it feels like we can never have a spotless home, I do recognize that my husband and I do have small habits that keep our home hovering at a “mostly” clean state, rather than looking like we have given in to complete chaos. Some of these habits came naturally since they were things that we each grew up doing, and some of these habits were things that just developed in order to maintain cleanliness in this hard to keep clean era of life. Thankfully, these small habits proactively reduce the amount of time we need to spend cleaning everyday. The good news is, these habits are small, doable, and I would like to think they are realistic for most average households to pick up if they wanted to.
No Shoes in the House
This one is a strict one in our home. But, I understand that it can be a polarizing thing. You either grow up taking your shoes off when you’re inside or you don’t. If you are used to wearing shoes in the house, it can be tough to break this habit. But, once you get used to it, you’ll see a difference. Not only will your floors seem cleaner at a microscopic level, I’m sure you’ll have less visible dirt in your home as well. Sometimes it’s easier to do this, if you set up some sort of entry way that gives you a limited area to comfortably take off your shoes and put them on a designated shoe rack before you can continue walking into the rest of the house. If the hold up is that you are more comfortable wearing some sort of footwear at all times, I would suggest having “inside slippers” in order to feel supported indoors, and having “outdoor slippers,” in order to be able to quickly slip in and out of footwear when you need to do something quick, like grab something from the garage or a package from outside. But either way, if your goals include keeping your floors clean, you should adhere to the no shoes inside the house rule.
Put Things Back
If everything you own has a designated place where it lives when not in use, you’ll never misplace anything! Not to mention, everything will be a lot neater. Make it a habit that if you use anything, that you return it to its home before going about your business or moving on to your next task. Doing so will save you time and an eye sore later. In most cases, giving everything a home also keeps everything out of sight, reducing the amount of visual clutter with minimal effort!
Seasonal Declutters
We started doing more seasonal decluttering once we had kids because just with more people living in a household, naturally, the more stuff accumulates. Honestly, in conjunction with more frequent decluttering, we have also become more conscious about our spending on material items. The combination of the two habits have resulted in more space and being happy with the things that we keep in our home!
Start a Toy Rotation
Starting a weekly toy rotation was an absolute game changer for our living room space! As any parent knows, the toy situation can get out of control fast. I swear, the toy takeover just creeps up on you! It’s easy for the accumulation of toys to go unnoticed until they eventually take over the majority of your family’s shared spaces. However, having a weekly toy rotation hides the majority of out of rotation toys out of sight, and gives you the opportunity to go through your toy inventory and declutter on a normal basis if necessary. So far, I’ve been doing a toy rotation for a couple years now and it does get easier with consistency. If starting a toy rotation seems intimidating, you can check one of my past blog posts, “Easy Toy Rotation for Busy Moms.”
Take Care of Your Mail
Sometimes physical mail can be the worst when it comes to keeping your home looking clean. We used to have the bad habit of letting our junk mail pile up until there was so much, we couldn’t ignore it anymore. As you can imagine, papers piled up on a counter just look messy. The same goes for boxes! We live in a time that buying things is so accessible, but the downside is having to deal with the boxes. I realized that if I didn’t want boxes cluttering our entryway, I needed to break down the boxes immediately after opening a package. In order to get on top of the habit of going through mail and breaking down package boxes in a more timely manner, we had to have the right tools within reach yet still kept in a child proofed location. We moved our paper shredder downstairs for any mail that needed shredding, we use this box cutter to easily open and break down boxes and we use a generic address stamp roller to remove our address or personal information before recycling. Once we had everything that we needed to more easily go through our mail, we tried to go through mail or packages immediately, if not at least by the end of the day.
Wash Dirty Dishes Immediately
Washing or putting dishes in the dishwasher as soon as you’re done using them helps tremendously with keeping up with the overall organization of our kitchen. Some of the reasons this habit makes such a huge difference is you don’t really have to worry about stubborn hardened food particles on your plates if you wash them right away, you won’t have to worry about dirty dishes taking up counter space, and you won’t have to spend forever washing all the dishes at the end of the night. On average, it takes me about 5 minutes (or less) to put mine and my kids’ plates in the dishwasher after every meal and snack of the day, with the exception of washing pots and pans after cooking dinner. So, it really won’t take too much time at all to clear the mess if you just commit to getting it done in small doses right away.
Unload the Dishwasher in the Morning
One thing that my husband does for our family every morning is empty clean dishes from the dishwasher before the kids wake up. I am so thankful that he has incorporated this into his early morning routine because an empty dishwasher means there’s ample space for me to put the dirty dishes away when I get down there with the kids and hit the ground running!
One Load of Laundry per Day
I know this is not going to work or be the easiest for everyone, but as a stay-at-home mom, I find it helpful to do one load of laundry a day. It doesn’t always end up being a huge load of laundry, but sometimes that’s the way I like it. It feels more manageable and faster to fold. Since laundry is something that I tend to just fit into my day anywhere that I can, I know our clothes don’t always look pristine. Some clothes look a bit wrinkled when I put them away, but they are clean and our laundry hampers are almost never overwhelmingly full.
It wasn’t until I had children, when time became more noticeably limited, that I really began to depend on our routines and habits in order to maintain a mostly clean home. Because I’ve been happy with the cleanliness baseline of our home over the years, I’ve come to never underestimate the effectiveness of small habits. These are just habits that helped me tackle the things that bothered me the most. Like I’ve always thought, homemaking is so personalized. I would start with finding out which parts of your home overstimulate you, and start with developing a routine that will help you keep that area nice and tidy. From there, I’m sure you can continue adding habits that fit your lifestyle in order to maintain your ideal home!
