Let me paint you a picture. It’s early in the morning. Your kids didn’t sleep all night. So, you also didn’t get enough sleep but you’re up because you need to get to work. Your little balls of energy wake up ready to tackle the day and immediately spread their toys all over your living room. You’re getting ready, dodging all these toys and all your clothes are sitting in multiple baskets still needing folding and putting away. So, you just grab the first work appropriate outfit that you can find that isn’t (too) wrinkled. You even grab the dingiest socks that don’t even match because all your clean socks are in a basket and you don’t have time to search for a better, match pair of socks. You just need to get through the out the door. You make it to the kitchen and there’s still dirty dishes from last night’s dinner (and maybe from the previous night too) and your floor is sticky because your 7-month-old is learning to eat and spilled their food everywhere, but you didn’t have enough time to mop. You stumble through getting your coffee and lunches packed for the day. Then you quickly grab some extra clothes from the clean clothes basket for your kids with some extra diapers to throw in your diaper bag so you can be on your way.
Once the kids a loaded and you’re heading to take them to childcare, you finally have time to take a breather as you drive. You sit there and think, how did my house get to be so messy???
Well, we’ve all been there and done that. And frankly, for me, I’ve been behind in cleaning my messy house since we decided to take a trip for Memorial Day weekend a few weekends ago. So that picture was a realistic description of my morning navigating my messy house. I’m going to explain to you how I plan to get started with cleaning my messy house.
- Identify 3 of the biggest, messy spots that would actually make a difference if you were to take action today. Make it simple, specific and easy to do. It needs to make a difference for you. Ask yourself, what are the 3 areas that if you erased the mess, my life would be much easier, I would be much happier, or my home would just look much cleaner?
- Create a plan for you to take action on to resolve those 3 messy spots in 5 minutes or less for each item. This plan does not need to be long or really detailed. Simple is best because remember, you want your actions to be about 5 minutes. You’re not deep cleaning at this point.
- Decluttering! And I don’t mean, going through all your stuff and looking for things that don’t ‘spark joy’ to get rid of. I mean, quick decluttering where you’re just looking for things that are out of place. First item that you’re looking for that is out of place is TRASH. Just throw away trash! Literally, go through your entire house and just throw all the trash away!! All the wrappers from your food packages, the milk carton that didn’t fit in the trash can, the box that has half a bag of diapers in it, and the empty conditioner bottle outside of the bathroom tub. Throw it all away! (Yes, you can recycle but just get these things out of your living spaces). You’ll see a significant difference getting trash out from your house. Next, you’ll look for things that are out of place in each space your focused on. This doesn’t need to be crazy either. Put those things back where they belong.
- Now that you’ve gotten a good start, STOP cleaning. Yes, stop cleaning. Remember we’re just starting at this point and that’s it. This step is important because you need to make cleaning fun and manageable. Something you don’t enjoy, you’ll procrastinate doing (this is how our house got messy in the first place). If you put an ending point to the things you don’t enjoy doing, you’re more likely to do those things more often, like cleaning. So seriously, stop cleaning here.
- Make a new plan for tomorrow. How can you can maintain what you’ve done today? And start the process over again for tomorrow. Now that your house should be somewhat usable and maybe some spaces feel a bit calmer, you need to maintain that calm. Come up with 3 things you can do to maintain that calm. Then you can make list of the next 3 messy spot to work on. This could be next pain points or expanding on the same messy spots for things that need to be finished cleaned that you didn’t get to today.
Below is a real life example of my following these steps from my description at the start.
- From my morning, the dirty kitchen sink and floor and lack of easy to grab outfits are my biggest pain points and would make my mornings significantly easier. These are the things I want to focus on
- Action plan for items of focus: I will empty my sink by cleaning as many dishes I can in 5 mins and put the rest in my dirty dish wash basin(s) outside of my sink (I don’t have a dishwasher). I will quickly use my wet vac to vacuum/mop my kitchen’s dirtiest spots. And lastly, I can quickly grab outfits for me and my kids for the rest of the week and fold them out and have them ready. Today is Wednesday, so I need two outfits for the rest of the week for each of us.
- Real life Decluttering examples: put the mail in the mail catcher, hang up my daughter’s swim bag, put all the shoes on the floor where they belong, put any dirty clothes in the dirty clothes baskets, consolidate the clean clothes into a single place, throw all the toys in a bin, fold all the throw blankets etc. NOW, my home should be manageable. Is it perfect?? No, it isn’t. But now I can get through the things you need to do without tripping over shoes or toys.
- Literally, I stopped here. I had already gotten momentum but I had somewhere I needed to be so I new I needed to stop. But I really, really wanted to keep washing dishes until they were all done! I also didn’t even wipes down my kitchen table or counters! And I wanted to vacuum my carpet in the living room too, but I didn’t. This was so hard for me but I listened to myself and I stopped.
- My tomorrow to do list, 3 things to maintain is continuing the dishes, clean the floor right away when something is spilled, folding and putting away one load of laundry. My next three messy spots are the kitchen counters/stove, the living room carpet, and the bathroom toilet.
All of this together took me about 35 minutes total. I wasn’t able to give timestamps as I kind of did step 2 and 3 at the same time. If that’s something you want next time, let me know. Otherwise, below are some before/after pictures.
Kitchen before/after:
Living Room before/after:
Laundry before/after:
Kitchen floor before/after:
So, like I said in step 4, this is just a start. Your house won’t be perfect. You’re not deep cleaning. You’re only getting momentum to star. Continue daily with these steps. As long as you keep up, you’ll get faster and faster with this process. Once you get faster, the list will get shorter and your house will stay cleaner for longer. Below are links to my wet vac that I use and its supplies. This thing is amazing!
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