Hi all,
I must apologize for being MIA for the last 2 months. I’ve been focusing on getting organized and spending time with the family. This post will be short, but I am hoping to post more often.
So specifically what have I been up to? Learning how to coupon (I’ll post something on this shortly), reorganizing the house, getting ready for a garage sale and all sorts of fun stuff.
I wanted to share with you today a few of the things I’ve done in the past couple months to help keep my house easier to clean and organize.
First thing I organized was my kids toys. We have shelves, book cases and a toy box, but I still couldn’t keep the kids toys from being all over the place all the time. What I’ve done to alleviate this is sort through the toys and pull some out for the recent garage sale I had. Then I went out and bought plastic see-through bins and put similar toys in each. Then I added a picture label to the box so the kids could “see” what should go in there since they can’t read.
I ended up with was: a box of games, a box of toy cars, a box to put the race track in when we’re not using it, a box that all the marble track pieces in, a box for all the lincon logs and I found a cute wicker picnic basket that I put the kids coloring items in. We still also have the toy box, which all other random toys go into.
This has really helped. When we clean up, the kids know right where everything goes. The kids area still gets messy, but less messy and it’s easier and faster to clean now.
The next thing I’ve done deals with laundry. Let’s face it, laundry is never ending so why fight it? I try to dry a load and wash a load every day. It doesn’t always happen every day, but close to it. When the kids go to bed, I spray water inside the drier (I’ve already dried this stuff the previous day, but didn’t get to remove it) and “fluff those clothes. At the same time I throw a load in the washer.
When I’m done “fluffing” the dryer load, I hang up and put away the clothes. After doing that the washer is done and can move over to the drier. If there’s enough time I just keep the rotation going. If I run out of time, I pick up where I left off the day before. Just make sure not to leave anything in the washer longer than over night or it gets a funk to it and you have to re-wash it.
The last thing I’ve been doing is running the dishwasher every or every other night. With a family of 4 it’s easy to fill up the dishwasher on the weekends. On the week day’s it tends to get run every other day, since it fills slower. If it’s run, I try to clean it out while I’m making dinner, that way we can just put the dinner dishes right in the dishwasher when we’re finished and I don’t have to scrub them off later in the evening to load the dishwasher. If we fill the dishwasher after dinner, I run it right away and put them away before bed, so it’s clean for the next time I need it.
To some these may seem like common sense types of tips. But for someone like me they weren’t exactly common sense…they were tasks I didn’t like doing….but making it a habit has made it less of a chore and more of a quick job.
If you’re not already doing these things, try to do it for a month. They say it takes 21 days to make a habit, so if you work really hard at it for a month, it will become part of your routine and won’t seem like much work at all in the time to come.
Now, I still need to work on getting a routine for bathrooms and kitchen/bathroom floors so if I come up with anything I’ll share. If you have some tips, I’d love to hear them!
