Cleaning Ideas

In honour of the cleaning and decluttering I’m doing around here this summer, here are a few ideas for keeping on top of stuff around the house:

1)      Pick one ‘Never Get Around To’ task, and one ‘Big Project’ task to do at a time.  The NGAT should be literally something annoying, small, fixable in minutes, but just…you know, never gotten around to.  For example, my thyme plant, which needed desperately to be trimmed of dead growth and that I had steadily ignored for weeks, but still allowed to get on my nerves every single time I looked at it.  In contrast, the BP is something that you are working on over the course of possibly several days.  Washing the walls in the house would be a BP.  This seems miniscule, but if you did 1 NGAT a day, you would complete 365 of them a year, and 1 BP a week would result in 52 of them in a year.  I can’t even think of 52 BPs in my house.

2)      If you aren’t working outside the home, plan to make housework something that takes 2 hours per day.  If you’re lucky enough to have helpers this, I’m sure, could be cut down substantially.  I’m saying 2 hours because I think you’ll need 1 hour of maintenance cleaning (your daily jobs, like tossing in a load of laundry, washing dishes, etc.) 15 minutes of daily decluttering, 15 minutes of work on your current big project, and 30 minutes of extra time.

3)      Don’t focus on one area at a time.  If Monday is ‘bedroom day’ make sure that you don’t spend your full cleaning time allotment there or else the rest of the house will fall apart over those 24 hours.  It’s much better to split your days into sections that pertain to multiple rooms.  Monday might be ‘window day’, where every window gets cleaned, Tuesday could be ‘carpet day’ and you vacuum all your rugs, etc.

4)      When you get to the end, stop.  Do your task and move on; don’t get sidetracked by other tasks.  If your BP for the next few days is to clean the fridge, for example, spend your 15 minutes on it and don’t decide that “hey, I should start a grocery list!” or “This pickle jar is almost empty; that reminds me that I wanted to rinse out the recycling”. 

5)      Declutter with a purpose.  If you give yourself 15 minutes, utilize a timer and bring a garbage bag.  Make quick decisions and finish your section, don’t try and do something that will take an hour.

The best cleaning blog posts I've read

I recently wrote a series of updates over the course of an hour on Facebook, just to track what I could accomplish with one solid, steady hour of cleaning. What I managed (while both children were asleep, mind you) was to give my kitchen a thorough clean. I did the dishes, cleaned the microwave, emptied the toaster crumbs and even filled the sugar bowl along with the usual dishes/stove/etc. sort of cleaning. I didn’t manage to wash the floor in my allotted time, (although I swept) nor did I do any ‘deep cleaning’ like defrosting the freezer, emptying cupboards and washing them, or cleaning the walls. What I proved to myself, though, was that 1 hour was all I needed to bring a dirty room up to ‘company’s coming’ standards.


I’m not a housekeeper who should be emulated by anyone who is looking to make this their ‘job’, but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve, and I thought it might be fun to share them here in this space. Fun for me, that is, I can’t imagine you’re going to derive much enjoyment from it.

I’m pretty obsessive about planning, organizing and knowing what exactly to do at each and every point along the way, and so you’ll find that my advice tends to be this way as well. And when I am unsure about something, or want to become better or more efficient at it, I tend to research the issue to death. With that in mind, to start off here are a few of my best reads on the net about where and how to start.

The Stressed Mom wrote this post to highlight 10 of her best tips for keeping the home running smoothly. Some of them are a little elementary, but there is one that saves me time and again. Do one complete load of laundry per day. That’s washing, drying, folding and putting away! Especially if you are using cloth diapers, running a load of those through a rinse and then continuing with your reg. laundry will save you.

A Slob Comes Clean is a great starter resource that I came across when I was starting our decluttering journey. She’s very real, very funny and even has her own Youtube channel. Also, her ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures actually look something like MY before and after pictures, which makes me feel better. You don’t see a lot of bedrooms online that have a pile of clothes on the floor. For the next little while she also has an e-book that teaches you how to teach your children to clean, and it is free.

Dwija at House Unseen, Life Unscripted wrote a guest post that I completely agree with on when tasks need to be done throughout the day. So many times you hear about how you should be able to just clean, regardless of where the kids are, what they’re doing, etc. And the fact is, that’s not true! Trust me, I have a two year old and a newborn and if I leave them alone they’re going to need me within five minutes. Dwija splits her housecleaning into really practical sections, and you should check it out.

Happy reading!

When decluttering takes all day.

Sometimes decluttering is a multi-step process.  Case in point, the bathroom 'catch all'.

Step one: you see the mess.

Step two: you throw away everything that is obviously garbage, plus your purple eyeshadow and any random cologne samples that smell like surface cleaner.

This is as far as you can go in the few minutes in between making food for the minions and the other aspects of life that are encroaching on your 'organize my bobby pin' time.  Or whatever you collect.  So you take a break.

Several hours later you have a five minute lull in the colicky baby crying, and for a brief moment you are the sole person awake in the apartment.  Quickly now, don't waste time.

Step three: you go through the pile again.  This time you remove everything that doesn't belong there; medication (which prob. shouldn't be right where the 2 year old can eat it.  Although, how much damage could he really do with saline drops and old tums?  Still, bad mothering all 'round.) book covers, dirty laundry (why, Lord?  Why?) jewellery, etc.

This is as far as you can go, because the magically vibrating basinette isn't shaking, er, gently caressing your child fast enough and she's awake from her 4 minute beauty rest ready to vomit in your hair again.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, this time one handed as you hold the baby in your other arm, you forge ahead.

Step four:  You gather together like items.  All the bits of shaving whatever they ares that fit together in some fashion to remove male facial hair go into a Ziploc bag.  All the makeup you never wear and more than likely bought for your wedding goes into another bag.  Etc.  Finally, to prevent the area from reverting to a catch-all you take away the tempting flat surface and replace it with a more compact holder.

And there you have it.  Sometimes it takes all day.

Kitchen cabinets cont.

I was really pumped from the tea purge, and so whenever I've found a few minutes without children, pets, husband, or house requiring something from me, I've been organizing and decluttering.

From this

to this

And from this

to this (pretty impressive, this one, I think).



These 2 shelves took me less than 5 min. each, which begs the question:  what was I waiting for?  Well, that and 'what am I doing with 130 milk storage bags?'

Purging the tea shelf.

I was pretty excited about decluttering something today!  I wasn't sure what I was going to tackle, but I just wanted to get my hands 'dirty' and throw useless junk away!  So, I did what I always do first thing in the a.m. and made a cup of tea, and as I was doing this I looked at the tea shelf and made up my mind:

The tea shelf it would be.  I don't drink even 1/3 of the teas up there; I'm not even sure I know what teas are up there, actually.  At first it was easy:

These ones were teas I knew I didn't drink.  Some of them I wanted to drink, but if you've owned it for a year and haven't finished it yet, well, I think you need to let it go.  That purge brought me to this:

Believe it or not, those few teas still indicate my unwillingness to 'let go' of stuff.  The Earth Mama, Angel Baby sampler, for example, is tea for expectant mamas.  I'm not expecting.  I won't be again for some time and when I am, this tea will undoubtedly be stale and need to be replaced.  But it was expensive, and I had trouble letting it go.
Suck it up, Elliot, the point is to declutter, not hold on to leaves.  So I packed it up as an offering for a pregnant friend.  And then some of the teas were almost done, and so I put them on the counter to remind myself to finish them off...and we end up with:

There we go.  One shelf done.