Life is Messy, Clean it Up!
Tips and tricks for keeping a clean house with little kids
Ah, Spring! A time of rain and sunshine, a time of mud and buds, a time of singing birds and blustery wind, a time when mothers everywhere get the urge to do a deep clean after the long winter hibernation. And yet, if you are a mother of young children, you may find yourself thinking that this desire for a clean home is firmly out of reach. We’ve all seen the memes about it, we’ve all seen the reels telling us to lower our standards, we’ve probably all been told personally that having a clean house is impossible with little children at home. And while this is all supposed to help us feel better about the state of our homes and the stage of life we are in, for me it does the opposite. The state of my head is directly tied to the state of my home, and hearing that both are destined to be an inevitable tornado zone until my children become teenagers only leads to discontent and depression, not contentment and acceptance.
Thus I am glad to have known and still know families of little children who managed to keep a “reasonably clean home.”1 These are not families with maids and pristine museum rooms, but rather houses that are lived in, inviting, and cozy while still being clean. I have been able to observe how they do things, and see that it is indeed possible to achieve. I truly think that the state of the house impacts everyone inside it. It is easier to think clearly, to have fun, to play games, to find things, to make things, and to be happy in a house that is reasonably organized and tidy. I’m not writing this post today from a place of having it all figured out. I have four young children and a very large house, and it is a struggle to stay on top of housework. In certain seasons of life, especially in the newborn stages and pregnancy stages, you have to allow yourself to relax a bit in your expectations. However, I have either been pregnant or had a nursing child for the past 8 years, and I have striven to build habits and systems to help me keep my house from falling into a state of chaos, because living in that state is life draining. What has helped me most is learning from other homemakers how they manage to stay on top of the housework, not being told that it can’t be done. And most of the tricks of having a clean house come down not to one gigantic and overwhelming cleaning day, but rather small, everyday habits that keep the mess at bay. As Charlotte Mason writes,
“[A] habit is a delight in itself; poor human nature is conscious of the ease that it is to repeat the doing of anything without effort; and, therefore, the formation of a habit, the gradually lessening sense of effort in a given act, is pleasurable.”
Habits gradually lessen the sense of effort. They are even pleasurable! What encouragement! With that in mind, here are a few habits and tricks that I have learned that can help you on the path to a reasonably clean home. This will be the first in a two part series, the second part with ideas on how to manage the Big Spring Clean itself, if so inclined.
Do a load of laundry every day and always fold the laundry immediately on taking it out of the dryer. Laundry is my least favorite household chore because it is never, never done. Early on, I tried to do all my laundry in one or two days, and then I would feel frustrated and behind as that stopped being enough for our growing family. Leila Marie Lawler actually changed this for the better for me when she wrote “When I realized I just had to accept the laundry as not so much a continually surprising burden, unforeseen, unjust, terrible, but more as actually one of my main jobs that I should probably just schedule into my daily life, I reconciled myself to it.” Try to recategorize laundry from “an annoying chore I hate that keeps coming up and that I’m always behind on” to “one of my daily, predictable tasks like cooking food or changing diapers.” Here are some more laundry tips:
Make it a predictable habit. Start a load right away in the morning, either right before or right after breakfast. Move it to the dryer or the clothesline right before or after lunch. Fold it right before or after supper. Plan to do this every day, depending on how much laundry your own family needs.
Avoid the dreaded laundry chair. We all know about it- the place that you’re tempted to dump the clean laundry when you take it out of the dryer to keep until you fold it later- which of course means never. Maybe it’s a chair, maybe it’s your bed, maybe it’s a laundry basket. Either way, this doesn’t work! And it stresses you out to have extra work hanging over your head that you haven’t finished yet! Your clothes get wrinkled, the pile gets bigger and more insurmountable and ugly, and no one knows where their clothes are. One huge habit that you can do to improve laundry is to force yourself to fold the laundry as you take it out of the dryer or off of the line. You may not get it put away right then. That’s ok. Laundry is always in transit. But you will feel so much better if it’s folded and waiting to be put away than if it’s in a pile, your clothes will look much better, and your chair or bed will be clear and ready to be used as furniture.
Give your kids their own baskets to put away their own clothes. We just use a rubbermaid dish pan for each kid with their name on it (an idea lifted directly from my mother). When I fold clothes, I put each of my kids’ clothes directly into their bucket, and they are responsible for putting it away and bringing the bucket back. This can be done as young as three years old! Even two, if you assign a big sibling to help! You can also have separate baskets for your and your husband’s clothes, to make putting them away easier, and separate baskets for towels and sheets as well.
Teach your children to bring their dirty laundry to the laundry room and how to sort it. Teach them that if the laundry hamper in their room is full then they need to bring it to the laundry room and sort it. Very young children are capable of sorting clothes into darks, lights, and colors. Then when you go to the laundry room in the morning to start your load, you have things sorted and ready for you.
If your laundry room is on a different level of the house than your kitchen or bathroom (it is for me), keep a hamper somewhere nearby for you to put dirty towels and rags in. This eliminates the need to run upstairs or downstairs every time you have a single dirty towel, and makes it easier to grab them and sort them all at once.
“A place for everything, everything in its place.” This is one of my mother’s favorite sayings. You can’t expect to have a relatively tidy house if the things cluttering it up don’t have a place to go. Look around at the major sources of clutter in your house right now. Are they cluttering up spaces because they have nowhere else to go? Or are they cluttering up spaces because their assigned place is too much effort to get to? Either way, this can be fixed!
This is a never ending process of evaluating and attending to. You’ll never be done with this, so it’s good to revisit from time to time.
Is mail getting lost and cluttering up the table? Make a designated mail spot that’s close to where you automatically bring it. Maybe a basket, maybe a paper holder? Anything that works for you.
Are kitchen utensils or appliances always sitting out on the counter because you use them frequently and it’s a pain to put them on the high shelf where they belong? Either make a new home for them on the counter, or find a cupboard with easier access to store them. Are there things on your counters that you use only once or twice a month that could be put somewhere else to make room for a more frequently used item?
Are arts and crafts supplies for your children constantly on the floor and on the table? Maybe this is because the hassle of putting them away is more complicated than it needs to be. Is there a closer cupboard or a closer shelf where you can store them? Maybe even a rolling cart that can move with them?
Do you need a place for the clothes that you wear once but aren’t dirty enough for the hamper? If folding them and putting them back in the drawer is too much, make a designated basket or hanger for those clothes in your room.
Whatever place your choose for your things, the key here is to simplify the process of putting your most cluttering items away. The easier it is to put them in their place, the more likely you are to do it.
Flowers on the Windowsill from A Home Series, Carl Larsson
Try to return to a state of relative tidiness in your most lived in rooms every evening. Picture to yourself how you would like your house to look when you wake up in the morning, or what it would need to look like for you to feel comfortable with an unexpected guest dropping by. Aim for that by the time you go to bed each night. Don’t make this into a whole house clean. Think about just the rooms you live in most: kitchen, dining room, living room, your bedroom. Focus on these instead of letting the whole house distract you.
Teach your children that you expect them to clean up after themselves and not to leave stuff out when they are done with them. This does mean that you will have to call them back to put things away sometimes when it would be easier to do it yourself. But if you can set this expectation and stick with it most of the time, they will quickly learn what is expected of them and rise to the challenge.
If you have multiple levels to your house, keep a catch-all basket on each floor for the things that are brought from another level. This can be cleaned out once a week, or as needed, and makes things easier than going up and down the stairs over and over while cleaning.
Master the art of the 5 minute clean up. At least once a day I have the kids do a quick tidy of our main living area. Often I turn on The Clean Up Song (A Spoonful of Sugar from Mary Poppins), and have them tidy up until the song is done. They may not get everything, but things will be much better than they were! This goes along with tip number 2: your children can quickly put things away if everything has its well-defined and well-placed place!
Teach your children to pick up their toys when you tell them to. If they have a play room, then this does not need to be every day! If they play in the family living room or in their bedrooms, it may need to be every day. Either way, teach them to do it when you ask them to, and if they can’t, then consider having fewer toys, or doing a toy rotation, so that they can handle it. They may grumble about it, but when it’s done they’ll have more fun with their toys in the clean space than they would in the chaos of mess.
The Studio from A Home Series, Carl Larsson Keep up with dishes! This may be a me thing, but it is amazing how much my mental state improves with the sight of a clean kitchen. If you have a dishwasher, USE IT. As soon as it is full, or too full for the next meal, run it. Then, before the next meal, empty it so it’s ready to go. If you don’t have a dishwasher, discipline yourself to do the dishes every night. You will feel so much better about life with a clean kitchen, and the time spent cooking will be much easier and more enjoyable!
Teach your children to clear their dishes after meals, scrape them, and stack them on the counter, not in the sink. If nicely stacked on the counter they can be easily loaded into the dishwasher, but if precariously stacked in the sink they have to be dug through and re-stacked before you can even start cleaning them.
Teach them to load and unload the dishwasher as early as you can. They can start helping with this at two years old, and if you do it with them cheerfully they might even find it fun. Also teach them to help set the table. Perhaps you can keep their dishes at their level so that they can put away the kid dishes and set the table with those as well.
Remind yourself that washing dishes does not actually take that long! Especially if you do it every day. If you have a dishwasher, then even after a full day with lots of home cooking, the dishes can be done in less than fifteen minutes after supper. If you let them stack up day after day, it takes longer and longer and you’re filled with dread and disappointment and regret every time you see them.
Clean as you cook! This is another trick from my mother. If you’re cooking or baking and you have some wait time in between steps, start washing the dishes. Fill the sink up with hot soapy water and start working until your next step in the recipe. It lessens the load for later and uses time you’re already spending in the kitchen.
Finally, don’t stop with the dishes! When you’re done with them, wash out your sink and scrub down the counters (or as my mom always said “shine the sink.”) Only a bit more effort and a lot more coziness and cleanliness.
If a job around the house would take less than five minutes and you’re capable of doing it now, do it now.
When you go into the bathroom, do you notice that the sink is looking dirty? The mirror covered with toothpaste flecks? The toilet a bit smelly? If you have five minutes to do a quick wipe down of the problem area, then do it! Don’t be like me, who often gets hung up on thinking that if I’m going to clean something I have to get it all done at once. Wiping down one part of the bathroom takes a mere minute or two, and it will make your weekly clean of the whole bathroom easier also! To make it even easier, keep cleaning supplies and a few clean rags in all of your bathrooms so that you don’t even have to go anywhere to start!
Make your bed! Some may argue it’s a pointless task, but it will change the entire feel of your bedroom. And it only takes a minute or two! Work it into your routine of getting ready for the day, you won’t regret it.
Always clear things from the table by putting them away, not just on a new flat surface. Flat surfaces like tables and counters are clutter magnets. They’re always tempting you to leave stuff there as a holding place. Try to resist this as much as you can! If you can put an out of place item away in under five minutes, then just do it.
Do you notice that one of your walls is looking pretty smudged and dirty? You don’t have to wait till you can wash every wall in the house! Get a rag and clean that one wall. You’ve now made progress!
Don’t do everything all at once. It’s tempting to do the Big Spring Clean, purging your house from top to bottom in one big swoop, but with little kids underfoot and many other responsibilities on your plate, this often becomes more intimidating and daunting than anything else. It’s so hard to actually complete it! If you can instead build habits into your daily life that keeps the house relatively clean, day by day, it will be much more sustainable and much easier on you. If you can, try even to spread out your weekly cleaning items on different days: doing the bathrooms one day, the bedrooms another, etc.
That being said, there is a time and a place for Spring Cleaning! If you have the motivation for it, that’s a good thing! I hope to write with some tips and resources for doing this in a Part 2 post soon!
Now is the time to remind you what I said at the top: this isn’t coming from a place of having a perfectly kept house and having it all figured out. Rather, these are tricks and habits I’ve learned over the years, that I’ve found to be extremely helpful to me in managing the household and keeping it to the level of clean I need and want it to be in order to have a pleasant home. If you can stick to your habits most of the time, then it will be easier to manage the abnormal times when life is too hectic or difficult to manage it all. And since most of this post is already owing to my own mom, (thanks, Mom!) I’ll end with one of her favorite motivational sayings: “Life is messy, clean it up!”
Download a PDF to print this article here.
I’m lifting this phrase from Auntie Leila who writes The School For Housewives and is full of tips and tricks for The Reasonably Clean House. Go follow her there!
Women 🤝 their houses being a direct representation of their sanity at any given moment
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It takes 2 minutes to make my bed. I know that because I'm often doing it as I brush my teeth with my electric toothbrush which lasts 2 minutes. The best time to clean the bathroom, especially with young children, is when you're bathing them. They play, you clean.