Keep the House Clean – 3 Surprising Reasons Your Home is Still a Mess

3 Surprising Reasons for your Mess
and 3 Easy Ways to Remedy It

Have you ever wondered why your home doesn’t stay clean? Why no matter how long you spend tidying a space, your little army of clones manages to recreate a battle zone in 10 seconds? Exactly how is it people can KEEP the house clean???

Keeping the house clean is potentially a problem for 3 reasons that you probably have not considered yet… It’s time to finally reclaim your home.

Let’s rethink the messes, and rethink your tidying strategy, to minimize both. Let’s start with the reason your house doesn’t stay tidy. Once you have identified the underlying reason, then it is easy to apply 3 ways that you can (easily) keep the house clean.

These tips are directed at the home, in general, but could easily be applied to supplies, books, and curricula in homeschooling.

3 Reasons Why Your House Doesn’t Stay Clean and How to Fix It.

Before I start, I have to say: having a mess isn’t your problem. Having a mess is a symptom of the problem. I know, I know, right now you’re thinking that means that your kids are actually the problem; they are the reason you have a mess!

True. Very true. But even deeper than the people in your space, the problem is actually the stuff – its quantity and its storage – and how you deal with that stuff. After all, if there was nothing to mess up, then the mess, and your kids wouldn’t be such a “problem,” would they?

Problem #1: You Reorganized or Moved the Mess

Remember all that time you spent last week (or weekend, or month) tidying up that space, and how great it looked when you were done? Then do you remember how quickly your family destroyed it? Yeah, that scenario happens over and over at homes around the world and it is really annoying.

My guess is that during the last clean-up you spent the majority of your time either:

1) Moving the items to a new, bigger, or seemingly better location, or

2) Organizing the items into newer, bigger, or more beautiful storage units or spaces.

This approach to your mess only sets you up for more messes in the future. Think of it as this: you didn’t clean-up the mess, you disguised it in pretty spaces and pretty storage.  Out of sight may mean out of mind… but only for a little while.

“Cleaning up” by reorganizing things into new bins and spaces is a ticking bomb – the items are just waiting to explode into a brand-new mess… the only question is when the next mess will happen…. and therefore, how long you can keep the house clean?

Problem #2: You Focused Only on the Kids’ Space and/or the Family Space

Do you…

• …spend all of your time addressing the kids’ messes so that you don’t have any time to take care of your own spaces?

• …use your bedroom, or closet, or kitchen as the catch-all space that you put-off dealing with until those rare moments when you feel like the rest of the home is under control?

• …feel guilty about giving attention to your own space, or making it beautiful when the whole family has a list of wants and needs?

 

 

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you may have just discovered a reason that your home isn’t staying tidy. The problem here is the subconscious message that you are inadvertently sending your family. I’ll discuss the solution below.

Problem #3: You Signed-Up for a One-Time Massive Project

If you went around your house last year and got everything in order – you cleaned out the garage, purged the kids’ closets, organized all the toys, and donated half your wardrobes – but now are frustrated because it needs to happen all over again, you may have a problem.

Maybe you only signed-up for a one-time massive project. You may equate cleaning out with cleaning up, and expect the spaces to stay neat after a major overhaul. Maybe you are an all-or-nothing kind of person (perhaps a little perfectionist); you are able to psych yourself up for the big project (maybe after sufficient procrastination), and make the place over.

Then, you want to sit back, and enjoy the fruits of your labor indefinitely. The problem is, at the end of the summer, your garage is a jumbled mess of bikes, a slip and slide, every type of ball known to man, and bits of sidewalk chalk… or is that just me?

So, which one are you?

Are you the Container Store Diva who can always find a cute basket to make the items look good?

Are you the martyr who takes care of everyone else’s spaces first?

Are you are the set-it and forget-it perfectionist?

Or, maybe you’re like me, and you feel like a hopeless combination of all three?

Do not despair! The painful part of this exercise is over – you have identified the real problem. Now, let’s talk about the simple ways to approach your mess differently and finally conquer the piles.

3 Simple Ways to Keep the House Clean

1. Don’t Reorganize or Move the Mess

This is Minimalist Homeschooling Mindset Hack #4: Don’t Reorganize or Move the Mess.

Seriously, you can spend too much time and too much money putting too many things into too many containers. But afterwards, you still have way too many things, and now you have way too many categories to sort every time you clean up!

If your children have to sort things into more than 3 categories, chances are that clean-up will feel daunting and tedious. If anyone in your home has to sort things into more than 3-5 categories, the job will seem like a big one.

Let’s think about cleaning-up as a chemical reaction. Remember activation energy – the energy required to start a chemical reaction? That activation energy can be low, in which case the reaction is more likely to happen spontaneously. Or, that activation energy can be really high – in which case the reaction is very unlikely to happen spontaneously – and some sort of catalyst (assistance, push, nudge) is required to get the reaction going.

If you have more than 3 bins for clean-up, clean-up is unlikely to happen spontaneously. Instead, you have increased the activation energy to levels that are more likely to require a catalyst: your assistance, or push, or nudge, or nag, or yell…

You get the idea.

How to solve this problem? Stop reorganizing the mess or moving it to a new location.  Reorganizing or moving the mess is one way reason you cannot keep the house clean.

 

 

Instead, purge, purge, purge. First, get rid of anything that is not used, or is a duplicate. If it is noisy and obnoxious, make it disappear. If you don’t like the message of the character, or how your child uses it, ditch it. Then, move on to removing things that are not necessary or loved. If you can’t get the items down to 3 categories, put the extra into a secondary storage location, and rotate the categories periodically. You can switch these stored items on-demand, weekly, monthly, never… whatever works for your sanity and space.

2. Set an Example

When you put your own space last, and sacrifice it for the sake of your family, you may not realize that you are setting a poor example. Your children are NOT thinking…

Wow, look at mom giving us all of her time and energy so that our bedroom can look great. I see how she doesn’t even take time for her own room because she loves us so much!

That may be the reality of the situation, but your children are instead thinking (consciously or subconsciously)…

I don’t know why mom freaks out about our room. I’ve seen her room.

Or…

It’s fine if this room is a mess. I’m used to it. It’s how I’m used to seeing things. It’s normal.

Here are the benefits of taking care of your own space:

• It empowers you to take on more because you are revitalized by your serene surroundings.

• You gain small a sense of control – especially since you have so much less control over everyone else’s things. It is grounding.

• Sets an example to your family about how a room will ideally look. They get the picture.

• It inspires your family to also want an inviting space when they see yours and admire it.

So, stop feeling guilty. Stop thinking everyone else’s space is more important. Stop imagining that you will have the time to take care of your personal spaces eventually. In reality, you will make much more progress in the entire home, and it will be easier to keep the house clean if you take care of your own space first; because focusing on your space changes both your attitude, and the perception of the whole family.

3. Make Ongoing Plans and Establish Purging Habits

It is awesome that you had a massive decluttering session. Congratulations! The problem is that birthdays keep coming; Christmas still happens every year; children keep outgrowing clothes, shoes and toys; things keep breaking…

To keep the house clean, you can NOT just put things back into bins and shelves each day! To Keep the house clean you must trash or donate things EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Designate a handy space for a donation box, and toss things into it as you go about life. If you’re folding laundry and see a pair of pants that were too tight the last time your daughter wore them, toss them in the box – do NOT set it aside for later, or start a pile. If you notice that a toy broke, trash it. The outgrown bike, deflated ball, and bits of sidewalk chalk can be dealt with immediately.

Don’t let broken, misplaced, unused or unloved items accumulate into a massive project. Just because you can rock the major overhaul, does not mean that is how you want to spend a weekend!

This principle works well also if you are putting off a massive overhaul. Instead of waiting for the perfect time, start NOW.  What are you or your children working with today? What space are you spending your time in? Can you go through the drawers, bins, or shelves and snag anything to be trashed or donated as you go about life? Can you set aside a bin of least loved toys and stash them in another location?

The habit of constantly purging and decluttering is probably more valuable in the long-run to keep the house clean than a massive decluttering session.

BONUS

Oh, and you’ve heard it before, but make sure everything has a place. If it’s not important enough for its own category or place, perhaps it is no longer important to your family. Or, to put it another way: it’s less important than your precious time and energy.

If you have a pile (or several), then this is your problem: Either a place does not exist for your items, or the place is not conveniently located, or the items are not worth a designated space. Change that.

We all need some stuff, and we all enjoy having other stuff. We share our space with people and pets who have their own stuff. So the trick is finding the best way to have stuff without it creating a mess and stress!

What is holding you back from keeping the house clean?  Which one of these remedies is the one you most need to implement? Join in on the comments below…

This post is part of a 36-week series on the Minimalist Homeschooling Mindset. While the book, Minimalist Homeschooling walks readers through a minimalist approach to prioritize, purge and plan their homeschools, this blog series goes deeper into the mindset and how-to’s of the daily journey.

If you’re looking to connect with more minimalist homeschooling folks, come join us on facebook, where there is always a friendly face waiting to connect.

Wishing you all the simple things,
Zara