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Cleaning By Phone

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Lately I’ve been lacking the motivation to clean my house. Once the weather is warm I just want to be outside. There is more than enough to do outside. I come in grab something to eat and go back outside. I’m like a little kid, outside until it’s time for a shower and bed. The dishes and the dust have been piling up. Today at work I was reading about an iphone app to hypnotize you to clean your house. When I got home from work I looked for it on my android. I couldn’t find it but I did … Continue reading →

Cleaning Cabinets

I’ve always dreamed of having specialty cabinets with glass inserts throughout my kitchen. Then, I open my wood ones and reality sets in. For starters, I don’t own pretty china and I would have to seriously overhaul my methods of organization (or lack thereof) given that all my house guests would be able to see the guts of my cabinets if I had the glass inserts installed. Cleaning and organizing kitchen cabinets is no easy task, especially if you have collected a number of dishes and accessories over the years. If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to make … Continue reading →

Deck Cleaning Time

We’ve had an unbelievably mild autumn so far. The fall foliage color show has been spectacular. The trees in our yard turned Cheetos orange and Doritos yellow, though now they are Ho-Ho brown and strewn all over the grass, our porch and our neighbor’s deck. If you haven’t winterized you deck yet, then this is the month to do so, especially if you live in the Upper Midwest like we do. It could snow tomorrow and those leaves will be even harder to remove. To begin the process you need to clear your deck. If the weather is still mild … Continue reading →

Cleaning Starts with Decluttering

Sabrina Soto is the queen of decluttering. Seriously, every time I watch the HGTV star work her magic on “Get It Sold” or “Real Estate Intervention,” I want to purge my home of all its contents, save for the couch, the beds and a tiny desk and chair set. According to Soto, clutter is a bad thing. If you’ve ever seen the TLC show “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” then you know she’s got a point. Excessive TV references aside, experts say clutter is a sign of bad habits: lack of organization, overspending, and attachment issues, just to name a few. Fortunately, … Continue reading →

Cleaning Schedules

Most people set aside one day a week to deep clean their home. When I was single I saved my big cleaning projects for Saturday morning. These days my schedule is less predictable, so I pencil in weekly cleanings on a day that I have the least amount of running around to do. I work well with lists, so when it came time to create a comprehensive cleaning schedule I grabbed a notebook and toured my home room by room to determine what tasks needed to be accomplished in each on a weekly basis. I divided my notebook pages into … Continue reading →

Preparing for Spring Cleaning

I have to start my spring cleaning early around here. Between caring for young children at home and working at home around their schedules, it can take a while to get everything done. In addition, my plans for spending an entire weekend getting it out of the way usually butts up against all of the spring home improvement projects that my husband has on his list. And the coming of the nicer weather makes us all want to be outside to enjoy it. So, I’ve been sneaking up on spring cleaning this week by getting as much of my preparation … Continue reading →

Cleaning as a Group—Even When They are Older

When my children were preschoolers and early elementary-aged, we did a lot of our cleaning together. Cleaning up the playroom or their bedrooms was something we did together so that I could teach them and model for them and I hoped to set a precedent for housekeeping expectations. It just didn’t work to send a four-year-old into a room and say “Clean this up”—it was too vague and too overwhelming. Over the years, and with plenty of modeling and organization, my kids have learned what is expected and have become pretty decent housekeepers. We still have a tendency to clean … Continue reading →

Spring Cleaning as a Family—All at Once or Over Time?

I tend to be the sort of person who wants to jump in and get a project done all at once. That goes for spring cleaning too—I like to set aside a Saturday and just really get down to it—dredging closets, cleaning out cupboards, washing all the rugs and curtains, etc. BUT, I’ve learned over time that if it’s going to be a “family project”—I might have to adjust my own personal style and allow for not only a division of labor, but also a breaking up of the time. Working on family projects—assuming that spring cleaning IS a family … Continue reading →

Schedule Everything!

I never realized how important a schedule was until I was a mom. When I became a single mother I found that schedules were even more important than I thought, and not just for Hailey, for me too. I soon discovered in the first months of craziness that is single parenting that I could not get a thing done. Laundry would be washed but not folded, dinner cooked but not cleaned up, grocery lists made but forgotten. Everything quickly got out of hand. I had to get my home life under control so I could make sure that Hailey and … Continue reading →

Because That’s The Way Mom Did It

When I was growing up, one day a week both my mother and my grandmother cleaned their houses. For one entire day we kids were banished from the house while Mom dusted, vacuumed, did laundry, wiped baseboards, cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom and scrubbed all the floors. Needless to say when I got my first apartment I followed the same routine. Every Saturday I cleaned and did laundry. At the end of the day I was proud of how my house looked but didn’t like the fact that I had to give up one full day on the weekend … Continue reading →