Home is where the heart is and our hearts sure have been home a lot more lately. Being home together has created so many memories (good memories, hard memories, and memories that will define #quarantine2020) and has also given us ample opportunity to do all the things together. Lots of things are happening in our homes and those things create a lot of one thing: messes. Meal messes, craft messes, toy messes, potty training related toilet paper messes, laundry messes, grass and mud in the house messes, baking messes, outside messes, more meal messes. Messes can literally take over our home.
My personality lends itself to like tidiness. I like things picked up, organized, put away. As you can imagine, my family of one husband and four babes doesn’t lend itself to being naturally tidy. Messes, yes. Tidy, no.
The One Thing for a Cleaner Home
The last several months of quarantine I have been paying attention to why and how our home becomes messy to the point of frustration. I have noticed our home is cleaner and tidier when there is less stuff available. Our house is easier to get back to ‘ground zero’ if there is less to pick up, less to put away, and less to manage and organize.
The one thing for a cleaner home is less stuff.
Not a cleaning schedule. Not hiring a cleaner (although that helps). Not buying the most natural cleaning supplies. Not even making your kids do it (although that helps a bunch, too).
The fastest road to a cleaner home is the stuff in it.
It is far easier for my family to tidy up, clean up, and get things put away when there isn’t a lot to tidy up, clean up, put away. I’m not saying we all need to get rid of everything we own, I’m saying if we are a teeny bit intentional with the things out and available in our home, it could save us some cleaning and some sanity.
Take Action
If you are in, let’s start with the main living area. Think of the place where your family spends the most time. Grab a trash bag and clear at least one large surface in the space, then take about half of the nonessential stuff and put it in the bag. If you need more bags, grab them. Put those trash bags in a closet for a week, maybe two, and wait. This isn’t forever, it’s an experiment to see if for your family and your home, less stuff will equate to a cleaner home.
Pay attention the next few weeks to see if your experiment is working. Is it easier to clean the space? It is simpler to keep it tidy? If in a few weeks you miss the stuff and you don’t see a difference, pull it back out of the closet and add it back in. If there is a noticeable difference, consider parting with those items or moving them to another part of the house or rotating items out of a closet, similar to a toy closet.
We all want to love the space we live in everyday. One way to love it is to make it easier to clean and keep up. Tell me: will you try the one thing for a cleaner home?