Five Pressure Points For Quick Cleaning Your Home

When you are a busy mom with young children, those daily cleaning tasks can get overwhelming. Here are a few tips that have helped me to keep our home tidy.

1. The big key in keeping your home tidy is to start off with an organized home. When everything you own has its own proper place (and your spouse and children know where that place is) they will be much more likely to both put things away, as well to find those things without asking you.The road to an organized home can be long (and, granted, you never completely arrive.) It takes time as well as weekly or monthly maintenance, but it’s worth it in the end. Plan to tackle one small part of your home each day until you feel your home is organized, whether it’s the junk drawer in the kitchen or the floor of your daughter’s closet. Make sure to enlist help from all family members, too. When they invest time in organizing the house, they will be more invested in keeping things organized.
2. Don’t let papers and messages consume you. Staying organized with your important papers will go a long way in keeping you sane as a mom. It seems like the children are forever thrusting a pile of important school papers at me. Designate an “inbox” for those items and try to go through them on a daily basis with your calendar in hand. Right away, write down on the calendar all of the appointments as well as all of those little things that moms are expected to remember. It’s also very helpful for me to keep a single calendar for all of my important dates, instead of separate ones for school and work.
3. Designate a particular day of the week to go through your bills and unopened mail, as well as to attend to any leftover school notes and announcements in your inbox. File the papers that you have processed directly after dealing with them.
4. Make it easy to recycle. Set up a system that makes it easy to dispose of such items as old newspapers and magazines as well as glass bottles, aluminum cans and cardboard. When each of these items has a home, you’ll be less likely to let those items stack up on the counter or under the sink. If you don’t have curbside recycling pickup, make a plan to go to the recycling center at least twice a month so that you don’t become overburdened with your recyclables.
5. Have a Morning Tidy Time and an Evening Tidy Time. Every morning, after your spouse or your kids leave the house for work and school, buzz through and do a quick clean up. Straighten things up, wipe off the counters, and sweep the kitchen floor. You may even need to start a load of laundry and clean the windows or vacuum the floor. Do these small tasks each day and they’ll be less likely to overwhelm you. In the evening, just before bed, do another quick once over. (If your home is already organized, it shouldn’t take more than 5 or 10 minutes). Put things back in their place so you can wake up to a peaceful home.

Jamie Jefferson writes for Susies-Coupons.com, where she shares coupons for her favorite online stores, including department stores as well as online catalog stores.

Tackle clutter with canvas collapsible containers. You can find them at Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart, Target, Stacks and Stacks , Linens and Things, the Container Store, and several places online. They work for me, I use them in almost every room:

They come in pretty colors too like this Simply Shabby Chic™ Canvas Storage Bin in Rose fabric.

Here’s some fun storage boxes from West Elm (out of my price range but this gave me the idea to decorate my boxes. If I figure out how I’ll let you know).

Ikea has some unique boxes and great prices.

The Container Store has several options.

Get More Great Ideas Every Tuesday and Wednesday

Every Tuesday and Wednesday hundreds of bloggers post super organizing ideas, cleaning tips, recipes, parenting helps, and more! You can browse and visit the topics you are interested in or join in by posting your tips on your blog. Use the links below.

Tackle it Tuesday is a blog meme to motivate you to tackle a project each week. Tackle It Tuesday is about giving ourselves incentive, deadlines and satisfaction in getting our household tasks done. (It doesn’t even have to be housework… just whatever is on your To Do list.) Go over and read through the encouraging posts.

Works for Me Wednesday is a “blog carnival” (explained here). You will find TONS of super organizing ideas, and home improvement tips on Works for Me Wednesday. Join in. Post a tip you’ve learned on any topic–anything that has “worked for you” in making your life easier.

Decluttering for Geeks, by Evan Goer is Part 1 of a 4-part series). Part 1 deals with decluttering computer components; here’s an excerpt:

Typical decluttering books devote at least a chapter or two about why decluttering is a good thing. To save space, I’m going to assume that you’re already at least partly convinced. Here’s the thumbnail argument:

• decluttering will save you time (you can find your stuff quickly)
• decluttering will save you money (you can live in a smaller house, or avoid using external storage)
• decluttering will save your sanity (you won’t be distracted by constant reminders of abandoned projects and rooms that need cleaning)

And here’s the thumbnail of the thumbnail argument. There but for the grace of God go we all.

Okay, so, computers. Most self-respecting geeks go through a phase of building their own computers. It’s fun to build exactly what you want, fun to compare and contrast different components with your fellow system builders, fun to put together a $500 box that outperforms the $2000 machine of the non-geek. You have powers beyond the ken of mortal men!

But like mathematics and women’s gymnastics, system building is a youngster’s game. Although the truly hardcore might stick with this hobby for decades, the typical geek burns out around their 30th birthday. All of a sudden, debugging overheating problems and scouring the internet for updated drivers becomes… less fun. You’ve reached the magical age where time begins to > money. Maybe it’s because you’re making more money, or maybe it’s because you feel the icy hand of death approaching. Either way, you sell out. You buy a Name Brand Computer, possibly a shiny silver one with a fruity logo. At first you feel guilty, dirty even. Then you get over it.

The end result is closets full of old, decaying systems, plus scads of individual components: Pentium II motherboards, PCI sound cards, and cables. Lots and lots of cables…

Read the rest of Part 1 here.

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