Clean Your Way Through Spring – 7 Steps to Maintaining a Home

I love my home. But I love the people I share it with even more – my husband, four kids and 6 other extended family members.  Our house is big, very big, and full of lots of people so it takes a lot of work to keep it clean and tidy.  Now I’m a list maker, planner and OCD bathroom cleaner.  I can’t function amongst mess and when things get past a certain stage of messiness I go into total meltdown mode and may possibly end up crying over the kitchen sink.

I know that not every household is like ours.  Most are smaller families with smaller homes.  But the common thread is we all have to keep our house inhabitable.  Now to each their own and so my standard of cleanliness is most definitely not everybody else’s.  But we all have to maintain some standard in order to allow the house to be used as a home and not a sick bed because the toilet hasn’t been cleaned in three months and now everyone  has e.coli. Learning to manage a house and all the people who live in it is a serious art form that takes planning and execution. So here’s a few life-saving lessons my mother taught me about managing a household.

How To Maintain a Home

1. Do at least two loads of laundry every day.

2. Make a meal plan for breakfast, lunch and dinner and shop only to that list.

3. Make dinner at lunch (if you have children).

4. Clean one room a day.

5. Find a place for everything and keep everything in its place. (If it doesn’t have a home – get rid of it!)

6. Saturday is family cleaning day. Everyone cleans and tidies everything.

7. Never stop doing all of the above.

Laundry and dishes to me are like death and taxes.  Everyone has to face them – forever.  I used to have major pity parties over all the house work I had to do, but then I realised I was just being selfish and lazy and got over it.  Why shouldn’t I take care of my home?  If I love the people I share it with I should desire to keep it at its best so that everyone can enjoy it.  But can I also say, its important to teach that same value to the entire family.  It’s a family home so let’s take care of it as a family.  This will lighten the load (many hands make light work) and will instil good life skills and values into your children.

Now where are those rubber gloves??