What You Need for a Clean and Organized Home

Keeping your home clean and organized is no small task. The main problem is that you live in there, with your whole family and all of their mess. Every time you pick something up and put it away, the next thing you know you can't find it and the room is messy again. Does that sound a little too familiar? Well here are six steps you can take to get your house in order.

Equipment

First of all, you need to have the tools. The tools will be different depending on your situation and circumstances. If you have hardwood, you'll need a hardwood cleaner. If you have young children, you'll need storage solutions that keep them safe as well as more mundane skills like how to get pee out of a matress. Cater your equipment to your needs; any cleaning tool that sits in the closet and never gets used needs to get out of your closet. It's just making the mess and clutter worse, not better.

Identify Problem Areas

As you cater your equipment, so to you must cater your approach. What areas of your house get used the most? Where does the mess really accumulate? Bathrooms and kitchens are common focus areas for cleaning, with bedrooms and media rooms close behind, but your family is unique. Maybe your lifestyle leaves your kitchen pretty pristine, but makes the mudroom into a disaster area. All people and families are different, with different needs.

Organize

While you're looking at problem areas, take note of what is causing the problem as well. This will help guide your search for the best organizational solutions. You may have to try several before you find one that works for you. Shoes collecting in the hallway often just need a place to get stored. If you make a place for everything, it's much easier to put everything in its place.

Prioritize

It's also helpful to prioritize, and this will partially be determined by identifying your problem areas. If the living room is a problem area, then maybe it's worth prioritizing. However, if you use the living room less often than the kitchen, it might make more sense to prioritize the kitchen even more than the living room. The point is that setting priorities will make it easier to accomplish the small steps that get you closer to your ultimate goal.

Bite-size

Keeping a house clean can be a gargantuan task, but even the largest task can be overcome if you break it down into bite-size chunks. Don't tell yourself that you're going to clean the whole house every day, that isn't realistic. Maybe you're just going to clean one room a day, or even every other day. A small task that can be accomplished in a few hours might seem like nothing, but it adds up over time.

Delegate

Plus, you can accelerate the whole process by delegating certain tasks. One person cleaning a room a day can probably clean a whole house in a week, but with two you can get it done in half the time. No one likes doing chores, and that makes it all the more important to divide the work up as much as possible. This is especially important with children, so that they can learn the habits of tidiness and organization as early as possible. Delegating tasks isn't just about making things faster. No one likes to feel that they are doing all the work alone. Cleaning up is good, but cleaning together is better.

These aren't magical life hacks, not really. These are simple, logical concrete steps that you can start taking right now to help get yourself focused on the task of cleaning and get your home neat and tidy. The best part is that no matter how big the mess is or how long it's been since you kept a house clean, it's never too late to get started and use these steps to clean up your life.