Earlier today, I was on a conference call with my family planning an upcoming birthday. Could we do it at my house or would that be too much trouble? Not at all, I said. I can have it clean by then. Everyone heard my husband laughing from the next room and they immediately knew why: he would be doing a lot of said cleaning! It’s not that I’m incapable or have a nasty house, it’s just…hard. I know other moms (and dads!) feel me when I say the onslaught of clutter is never-ending: kids kicking off shoes and sports gear, toys everywhere no matter how often you pick them up, school papers and binders and crayons and markers and clothes and dishes and… Whew, it can get a little overwhelming! And that’s just the everyday stuff. You still have to find time somewhere to scrub bathrooms, vacuum, mop, do laundry, etc.
So what if you’re like me and you’re not a natural cleaner?
What if you’re easily distracted and have a hard time finishing cleaning jobs or even knowing where to begin? What if on top of all that, you have a toddler hanging on your leg and can barely walk, let alone move across a room picking up toys or vacuuming? Unfortunately, I don’t have the secret to a perfectly clean home. I wish I did! I’ve known some moms who wait until their kids go to bed and then stay up late cleaning. That may work for some, but I can’t do it. My primary cleaning time is naptime. My oldest is in school and my toddler generally takes a two hour nap in the middle of the day, so I probably spend two days a week using that time for cleaning. Other days, I’m just lucky to eat lunch, take a shower, and catch up on other tasks that are easier to accomplish with the toddler asleep.
With that said, here a few tips I’ve learned over the years to combat my struggle with knowing where to start and how to complete basic everyday clean up tasks:
1. Have more space.
This one sounds stupid, I know, but for the first few years of our marriage, I didn’t realize how much harder it was to declutter and organize while living in apartments or a very small house with almost no closet space. It wasn’t until we moved into a slightly bigger house that had closets and a pantry, that I realized I actually had places to put things. I don’t say this to say go buy a new house, but that if you can’t figure out why the classic organizing tip of “give everything a home” doesn’t work for you, it may be due to your space and that’s ok. You can only do so much with that, but you may be able to get creative with your small spaces in a way you hadn’t thought of before with additional shelving or under the bed storage.
2. Have a robot vacuum (a cheap one works!) and use it to clean the perimeter first.
This is how I start my cleaning routine to declutter the floor of kids’ toys and prepare for mopping. I set the vacuum to perimeter, then across room by room, and then I have to clean everything in its path before it runs into stuff. It’s almost like a game and it makes me stay focused without time to get distracted by other projects. It’s also a quiet enough vacuum that it doesn’t wake up the napping toddler!
3. Start at one end of the room.
Sometimes I just need to pick up the living room. You wouldn’t think this would be an issue for a grown woman, but again…distractions. It helps if I start at one end and work my way across in a line. That way, if I forget what I’m doing for a minute and have to refocus, it’s an easy visual of where I left off and I can keep going.
4. Ask for help.
When I have a big clean out project that is going to take some time, I often ask my mom or a sister to come help me. If it’s time to go through my dresser and closet and get rid of clothes, not only do I get easily distracted, I also can never figure out parameters for what to get rid of and what to keep. It’s soooo much easier to have someone lovingly and sternly say, “No, you’re never going to wear that again, put it in the donation bag!”
5. Clear the surfaces.
Another struggle is small surfaces. The kitchen table, the countertop, the little side table — all those things are magnets for items like mail, kids’ art projects, special rocks the boys find outside, books, etc., especially when you have a toddler and you’re constantly having to put random things up high where they can’t reach! My best bet is to take a laundry basket, quickly put LITERALLY everything from the surface into the basket, and then I can wipe it clean and decide what belongs on the surface and what needs to go somewhere else. If I just look at a surface full of stuff and try to decide where things go, it’s not going to happen.
6. Make it a competition.
Sometimes my oldest son and I both need to clean our rooms, so we set a timer for 20 minutes, clean our own rooms as quickly as we can, and let my husband come through at the end and “judge” whose room is the cleanest. We’re both super competitive so it works for us! The winner gets a prize like a piece of candy or something similar (I think my husband is biased because he keeps picking my kid as the winner?!). Oh well; my real prize is two rooms being cleaned in 20 minutes!
7. Distract yourself just enough to not stop.
If you have a brain like mine that’s always flitting in a hundred different directions, it almost needs a tiny distraction to get down to business. It also has to be quiet since my toddler is napping. My best bet is to put in one headphone and listen to an audiobook or podcast; maybe yours is music or putting on an old familiar show on the tv. This way, my mind is just occupied enough to keep from going to other stuff that might pull me away from the task at hand and to forget how boring cleaning is!
Ok, there you have it. Cleaning tips from someone who really has a hard time cleaning. You should also know that if you come to my house, it may be clean and it may have toys everywhere, and we’re going to have a good time either way!
