Maintaining a clean home on a regular basis might be one of the hardest skills to master as an adult. Add pets, kids, spouses or roommates in, and it becomes even more challenging. Striking a balance between keeping your space tidy and keeping your sanity requires some trial and error. Everyone has different spaces, habits, and demands, which means that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. My husband and I currently manage a 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath home in the suburbs with two dogs, a two-year old, and a baby on the way while both working full-time. Here are some things I’ve found to be most helpful for keeping our home clean and tidy that can work for anyone:
- Take stock: Examine your existing expectations for “clean” and audit how much time you can realistically devote to home care in a week.
Historically, I have had pretty high standards for my house. I love keeping a clean home, and thankfully, so does my husband. This was easy to do when it was just us and the dogs, but it became a lot more challenging after our first baby. We found ourselves so overwhelmed and cranky from simply existing in a house that felt dirtier or more cluttered than normal. We eventually realized that we simply had to reset our expectations for what a “clean house” looks like in this season of life with young children. Our lives have changed in a drastic way, and our home was bound to reflect that.
We sat down and talked about how we were feeling and then decided we needed to agree on a new threshold of cleanliness that worked for both of us. We discussed how our time was used in the average week and took a hard look at the time left available for home care. For example, our daughter goes to bed at approximately 7:00 every night. That leaves us with a couple hours (we’re early to bed, early-rising kind of people) to “get things done.” We should be using that time to clean, right? Heck no. With both of us working full-time, our days sometimes feel like a desperate crawl to the 7:00 finish line, and we discussed how we both feel in need of relaxation in those last couple hours. So looking at our time throughout the average week, we realized we needed to prioritize certain tasks over others. For us, the sink has to be empty and the dishwasher must be running every night for us to function at our best the following day. But we can live with just mopping the floors every other week, as long as they’re not too bad. We went through a long list of tasks like this. Creating these new standards helped us feel less overwhelmed on the average day, and it also helped us take the pressure off ourselves to be spending more of our free time cleaning.
2. Break it down: Incorporate small tasks throughout the week.
After discussing what we had time and energy for in the average week (and realizing we had pretty much zero energy for extensive cleaning during weekdays), my husband and I found ourselves in this trap of trying to do it all on the weekends. Trying to do all the cleaning, grocery shopping, and meal prep on Saturday and Sunday quickly got old as we started to feel like our weekends were just becoming additional work days. We wanted to have fun on the weekends, too! How could we maintain a clean home without overwhelming ourselves during the week and sacrificing our precious time together on the weekends?
We started trying to sneak in small tasks throughout the entire week. We decided not to make a set schedule or calendar of tasks, but just go with the flow. If I got out of work a bit early one day, or my husband had some leftover energy after bedtime, we’d do a small task to chip away at weekend tasks. Some tasks could be doing a complete load of laundry (our goal: make sure you can actually dry/fold/put away or it will just hang over our head more than before), running the vacuum in a room or two, sanitizing the bathtub, cleaning out the refrigerator, etc. It’s surprising how much less daunting cleaning feels on the weekends when you’ve already gotten a head start during the week. But don’t overdo it–just do little tasks where you have the time or energy in order to avoid burnout.
3. Less is more: Simplify your home in order to simplify your cleaning needs.
In 2019, I learned about The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. If you haven’t checkout one of their documentaries, books, or podcasts, I highly recommend doing so! I think I could fill a book of my own about how much their ideas on minimalism have positively impacted our lifestyle, but instead, I’ll just give a quick summary. Owning less stuff means having more freedom. By owning less, you gain more control over your finances and your time.
Here’s one minimalist idea that changed my life: Every item you choose to carry through your door demands time from you. Furniture and décor needs to be cleaned, clothes need to be washed, food needs to be cooked, plants need to be watered, kids’ toys need to be organized and picked up, and so on. By owning less of the nonessentials, we can free up more of our time. Keeping this in mind helps me be more conscientious about what I decide to bring into our home.
Now I try to limit the amount of toys our daughter has available at any given time so that nightly cleanup only takes a minute or two. I also aim to only buy the fresh groceries we’ll actually consume in the week, otherwise I know I will end up spending additional time doing something with the excess food (freezing it, cooking it, etc.) to ensure it doesn’t go to waste. Our beds and living rooms only have the blankets and pillows that actually get used, so when it’s time to make the bed or tidy the living room, it only takes a minute. When it comes time to wash all the bedding, it may only take one extra load of laundry in additional to our week of clothes and towels.
At first, it may feel weird to start living with less. If you’re like me, you might have grown up in a home where your parents held onto a lot of extra items “just in case” and your inner voice may be telling you it’s irresponsible or wasteful to get rid of those extra things. This can be especially true if you live on a tight budget. Because everyone’s comfort level and situations are different, ultimately you have to use your judgement when it comes to what to keep and what to get rid of. If you’d like to try out living with less without totally committing to getting rid of your stuff yet, try packing away the “extras” or nonessentials for a while and see how you feel. Did you even notice they were gone? Did you feel it was easier to keep up with the house? Make your judgement after a couple weeks of trying to live with less!
4. Try habit stacking: Pair an established habit with a cleaning habit you hope to form.
Harness the power of psychology to maintain a clean home! As a former AP Psychology teacher, I’m a big fan of this one. Psychologists SJ Scott, Charles Duhigg, and James Clear have all written about the power of associating new desired behaviors with existing habits. Here’s how habit stacking works:
First, evaluate some of your typical, well-established habits. Maybe your morning routine includes drinking coffee first thing, then taking a shower, getting dressed, and driving to work. Let’s say you want to sneak in a cleaning task in the mornings. You could commit to unloading the dishwasher while your morning coffee is brewing. Maybe you could throw in a load of laundry before you let yourself drink coffee, and then transfer clothes to the dryer before you get dressed for the day. By using your existing behaviors and routines as a framework, the new behaviors are more likely to stick.
My best example of incorporating habit stacking isn’t cleaning related, but was in effort to get myself to drink more water. Every morning I take a large glass of water up to the bathroom with me and I make sure to drink all of it by the time I am done showering and doing my hair/makeup for the day. By adding on the glass of water to my established routine, I was less likely to forget about it and it didn’t take that much additional effort or time to complete. You can apply habit stacking to so many areas of life!
5. Reframe “chores”: Practice mindfulness and gratitude while taking care of your house to make the experience more enjoyable.
I have a big problem with the word “chore” when we use it to describe home management tasks. When I was a kid, my parents made my sisters and I clean our rooms and do our chores every Saturday before we could do anything fun. Looking back, I realize that I usually didn’t mind doing these tasks around the house. They gave me a sense of industry at a young age, and I enjoyed having clean spaces. But since they were always framed as these unpleasant, mandatory chores, I learned to really resent doing them.
In his book, “The Freedom Manifesto”, author Tom Hodgkinson explains how seemingly dull household tasks can be reframed as opportunities for contemplation, gratitude, and satisfaction. In today’s hustle and bustle culture, people tend to minimize or “hack” their way through household tasks–sometimes even spending a lot of money buying gadgets or paying other people to do the tasks for us. There are a few downsides to this….
He describes how doing these tasks ourselves might help us feel more at peace and satisfied with our lives. Doing dishes could be an opportunity for quiet reflection in your otherwise busy, overstimulating day. Vacuuming the carpet or mopping the floor can give you sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. We spend so much time staring at screens today, that many of us actually crave time to work with our hands and unplug.
By reframing chores as “home care” or simply “tasks”, they seem less daunting and less dreadful. I notice that I enjoy things like cleaning and laundry much more when I view them as opportunities to unplug and to take care of our beloved home and items that make our life full.
I hope that these five simple tips for maintaining a clean home help you reframe and reorganize your home care. Keeping a clean home can help us feel relaxed and enjoy our space and time at home more, but it’s also important to not let cleaning take over your life and all of your free time. Give some of these a try, and let me know if they work for you!