This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. You can find my full disclosure page here.
I have three children. My youngest child is a fearless toddler and by far the messiest of the three. During the day while my older two are in school, my almost-two-year-old runs around the house like a whirlwind, messy-ing anything he can get his hands on. To save my sanity, I have learned to minimize the mess and reduce my stress when it comes to keeping a clean home. If you want to keep a neat and tidy home without the headache of always having to clean up behind others, implement daily habits to keep your house clean.
Growing up, my mom had us trained to wake up on Saturday morning and start our cleaning routine. My mom kept a clean house, and she taught us to do the same. Now that I have a home and children of my own, I don’t know how my mom did it. How did she keep a clean home when we seemingly only cleaned one day a week? The secret? She cleaned a little bit each day.
Practicing daily habits to keep your house clean will save you time and energy when it comes to cleaning. A little a day goes a long way when it comes to cleaning. Many people designate one day a week to do all of their cleanings, but I found that keeping daily habits will keep your house cleaner, longer.
As you practice keeping your house clean, it will eventually become a lifestyle. Keeping your entire home clean may seem like a hard task (especially with kids around), but it doesn’t have to! As you find cleaning and organizational tips that work for you, keep at it. Create routines and schedules that work for you and help to maximize your productivity throughout the day.
Once you have perfected the daily habits to keep your house clean, reinforce those good cleaning habits with your family members. As a wife and mom, you can delegate the household tasks to your loved ones. You don’t have to it all! Remind them that keeping the house clean is a team effort and that no one is too young or too small to help or clean up behind themselves.
9 Daily Habits to Keep Your House Clean
1. Clean messes and spills as they happen. Spills can be a pain to clean up. But do you know what’s worse than a spill? A liquid spill that has time to set into the fabric, carpet, or counters. The longer the spill remains, the harder it will become to clean up later. Save yourself the time and clean up the spill as soon as it happens. I use this mop to quickly clean-up every spill.
2. Every item must have a home. Most of the clutter in your home builds up because it doesn’t have a designated place to go. Random receipts, junk mail, elementary school art, and other unnecessary trinkets all pile up with nowhere to go.
Having a designated place for everything will not only cut down on your cleaning time, but it will also make it easier for your family members to help clean up. Place labels on containers. Color coordinate kid items. Place all of your cleaning supplies in one closet for easy access when you need something.
3. Don’t be afraid to get rid of it. I am the Queen of “maybe I will need this later” and saving unnecessary junk. To keep your home neat and tidy, don’t be afraid to throw things away. If you don’t want to throw it away, make a pile of items to donate to someone who will use them. Get rid of anything that is taking up too much space and you no longer have a need for.
4. Clean as you cook. The kitchen is one of the hardest rooms to keep clean with a big family because it is always in use. To save time at the end of the evening, I clean as I cook. Before cooking, I empty the dishwasher. As I cook, I place dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of in the sink. If I am peeling a potato, I will throw away the scraps instead of letting them sit on the counter. As I open packaging, I throw the boxes in the recycling bin right away. After dinner is done, I wipe down the countertops and sweep the floor.
5. Sweep and vacuum daily. A clean floor can really make a room sparkle. Sweeping or vacuuming the floor is one of the few daily tasks that can take ten minutes or less to complete. Whenever you have a free moment to spare, quickly sweep or vacuum the floor if needed. To make this task easier for me, I purchased a cordless stick vacuum. It vacuums hard floors and carpet, making it easy for me to clean all of my downstairs floors in ten minutes or less.
6. Sanitize daily. Germs and bacteria like to linger on counters and surfaces. With two children in elementary school and one curious toddler, the number of germs that enter into my home is endless. From the bathrooms to the kitchen, I sanitize all countertops and sinks on a daily basis. I also wipe down and sanitize all high traffic items such as remotes, tablets, game controllers, and doorknobs. If your kids use it on a daily basis, you should probably take a few moments to sanitize it at least once a day. I use these wipes to do all of my dirty work.
7. Wash the dishes daily. Washing the dishes daily is imperative to keeping a clean and tidy kitchen. I have a dishwasher, so washing the dishes daily isn’t a hard task. At the beginning of each morning, I unload the dishwasher and put all clean dishes away. Throughout the day, I put the dirty dishes directly into the dishwasher instead of allowing them to pile up in the sink. At the end of the day, I turn on the dishwasher and let it do its job.
When we lived in Hawaii many years ago, we didn’t have a dishwasher. We had a lot of bottles and sippy cups (at the time I had two kids under the age of three), so I couldn’t afford to let the dirty dishes pile up. I kept a bowl of warm soapy water in the sink and whenever I had a dirty dish or utensil, I washed it right away (I encouraged my husband to do the same). If there were more than a few dirty dishes in the sink, I would take five minutes and clean as many dishes as I could while I had a few free moments. I stacked the clean dishes next to the sink using this drying rack and allowed them to dry.
8. Put it away. One of the easiest habits to keep your house clean is to put something away when you are finished using it. We teach our kids to, but even as adults it’s easy to forget the simple rule to “clean up behind yourself.” Train yourself to return things to their original place when you are done with it. A simple act like making your bed every morning can help to trigger your mind to put things back the way you found it.
If you are getting dressed and pull a dress off the hanger then decided not to wear it, immediately hang the dress back on the hanger. When you are done binge watching Netflix for the day, place the remote back where it belongs. When you are finished eating lunch, load your dishes into the dishwasher and wipe the crumbs off the table where you were sitting. If you clean up behind yourself now, you won’t have to do it later. Encourage your family members to do the same.
9. Power clean at the end of each day. This is my #1 top tip for keeping your house neat and tidy. After I put the kids to sleep each night, I set a timer to do a “power clean”. I give myself 15-minutes to quickly make everything neat and tidy before I go to bed. I pick up any toys laying around, hang up any coats left by the front door, and put all random things in their place.
I hope these tips help!
Leave a Reply