When I have a solid plan in place, I am able to keep my home so much more organized! These simple steps help make cleaning and decluttering easy.
Organization Ideas & Tips For The Home
Today I thought I’d talk about how I organize and clean our home, and share my tried and true system for keeping it that way without constantly feeling overwhelmed.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, the key to maintaining a clean and tidy house is having a system in place.
Trust me, our house is not 100% spotless 24/7. It is a work in progress, and that’s okay. We’re not working toward perfection here – just better habits.
If you’re needing some direction on how to keep your house clean & free of clutter as we head into a busier season, I’ve outlined my exact system below. (And I have a HUGE bundle of resources at the bottom of this post that will literally organize your entire life!)
A Simple System To Keep Your House Clean & Clutter Free
This post contains affiliate links, please see my disclosure here for more information.
Make A Plan
Create a plan with small steps that lead to the big change you want to see happen. By coming up with a few simple, intentional organizational systems – you can easily stay on track and keep your home clean and free of clutter.
I like to reevaluate my organizational plan twice each year to set our home up for success: once in January after the hustle and bustle of the holidays is over, and again at the beginning of fall.
Create A System That Works
I like to put pen to paper and physically write out all of my goals and tasks to keep our home clean & tidy using pretty organizational printables.
I am sure some of you are thinking, but my phone does this in the Notes app! While I DO frequently save notes on my phone, I use that more for daily to do lists and reminders. When it comes to forming a system for our home (and sticking to it), I’ve found that using a physical planner works best.
Feel free to use what works best for you, but I think it’s worth noting that we are 40% more likely to stick to a plan when we take the time to write down our goals. Just a little food for thought. 😉
When coming up with a system to keep the home clean and free of clutter, there’s 3 main things I like to focus on:
- Purge often – It makes sense: the less we own, the less we have to keep organized, right?
- Make organizing easy – Giving everything a designated home makes our house feel much less cluttered, AND I always know where to find things when I need them. Win-win!
- Create a cleaning schedule – Having a cleaning schedule will help breakdown large cleaning tasks and provide great motivation to get it done.
- Related tip: I recommend the cleaning plan included in this printables bundle that breaks tasks down by occurrence. You simply fill in the tasks you want to accomplish each week at the top, and then list your daily, monthly, and yearly cleaning items at the bottom to make sure nothing gets missed.
Now that we have our 3 big tasks to focus on, next we need to break them down into smaller tasks and assign them to a schedule or routine. (This is where the organizational printables can really come in handy!)
I’ve broken down the tasks into monthly, weekly and daily schedules and have included some examples of each below:
Daily tasks
Purge daily:
- Have a box or bin for donation items located somewhere in your home that is easy to get to. Set a timer for ten minutes or so every day to declutter a small area and then be done with it until the next day.
Organize daily:
- Put items back in their designated “homes”
- Tip for the mamas: Allocate bins and shelves for toys to teach little ones where it all goes so they know how to pitch in.
- Finish one task before moving onto the next
- Have a system for paper clutter (I have tips for this in my Declutter Guide)
- Create to do list for the following day
Related: These Amazon Storage Bins Will make You Want to Organize Your Whole House
Clean daily:
- Make beds
- Start (and finish!) 1 load of laundry
- Empty/Load dishwasher
- Sweep floors
- Wipe counters
Weekly tasks
Purge weekly:
- Pick one room/area of your home each week to go through and declutter. Need to clear a ton of clutter fast? Grab my guide Declutter An Entire Room In One Afternoon to help you stay focused and walk you through my tried and true method for decluttering.
- Add new items to Facebook Buy/Sell/Trade groups as well as Craigslist to earn a few extra bucks from items that could be useful to someone else. Read this post for some great tips for selling used items online.
Organize weekly:
- Create an organizing system for the area you spent decluttering. Read 15 Best Budget Friendly Organizing Items to get some ideas for how to organize each space.
Clean weekly:
- Clean floors, surfaces, and furniture in each room of the house. Consider assigning each room to a different day of the week, or choose to do the majority of cleaning on one day of the week. I created a printable cleaning planner that will help you stay on top of all your cleaning tasks with done-for-you checklists & worksheets.
Monthly tasks
Purge monthly:
- Take donation bin to your local Goodwill or thrift store
- Use this downloadable checklist and make a plan to decide which areas you’re going to focus on decluttering this month
Organize monthly:
- Fill out your monthly planner and create a plan of attack for organizing areas around your home.
Clean weekly:
- Flip & clean mattresses
- Clean rugs & mats
- Launder throw blankets & throw pillow covers
- Launder curtains and dust blinds
- Clean fridge, microwave, & small appliances
- Wipe down walls, baseboards, and windows
Pin the image below for quick reference!
Helpful Organizing Resources
Here are some things you may want to check out if you’re trying to create your own system for how to keep your house clean and clutter-free.
- Eliminate your paper clutter. Buy a scanner and go paperless – this is what we do!
- Check Pinterest for solutions to specific or uncommon organizing/cleaning problem areas. Pinterest is full of helpful resources.
- Grab my this printable cleaning planner and print it off at home to help you waste less time and accomplish more.
- If you appreciate physical books with real pages to flip through, I highly recommend The Complete Book of Organization. I bought this book for myself and loved it so much I bought a second one for my mom as a gift! Not only does it have some amazing tips & hacks, but it’s pretty too and would make a great coffee table book.
- If you have trouble letting go of “stuff”, check out my step-by-step decluttering guide (with printable worksheets!) that will help breakdown the decluttering process and walk you through decluttering an entire room in one afternoon.
- Make the most of your closet space. I recommend Easy Closets for creating customizable storage solutions. You can create your own custom design online (with the help of one of their designers) and they ship everything straight to your door and you install it yourself! Plus, right now when you shop through my link, you can get free shipping and save 5% by entering the code: CLOSETS165.
- Looking for cheap bins and containers? Checkout Save Dollar Stores. Save Dollar Stores is an online dollar store I’ve been using for a few months now. It saves me a trip to town, and they always have free shipping! Sign up for their newsletters using my link and get $5 off your first purchase!
If you plan ahead, you can really set yourself up for amazing success once the busy months hit. No matter if you work from home, have small children home all day, or if you only have a few precious hours after work and on the weekends, scheduling time to clean your home and get organized is important!
Otherwise, our homes can get real crazy, real quick! So instead let’s get crazy about getting organized!
My favorite cleaning tool…
To go a little deeper on this organizing crazy train, I’m so excited to share a resource that’ll help you stay on top of all your cleaning tasks.
It’s called The Ultimate Printable Cleaning Planner.
The Printable Cleaning Planner includes more than 29 pages of printables and checklists to help you simplify your cleaning system and stay organized so everything actually gets done.
It focuses on every area of the home and takes away the frustration of remembering all of the cleaning tasks that need to be done.
Each worksheet comes in the standard size 8.5″ x 11″ size you can plan on a large, sprawling page and organize them neatly inside of a binder. #winning!
And right now the entire bundle is on sale!!
You can see all the details about what’s included in the planner here and snag the instant download for yourself.
I hope this post has given you lots of ideas on how to keep your house clean by coming up with a system that works for you.
It all comes back to having a plan in place. That’s it.
And as important as I think it is to have a system to keep us on track, I think it’s just as important to give ourselves grace. So don’t get discouraged if you get behind on your tidy home goals, just start fresh and get yourself back on track!
Related articles:
How to Ditch the Clutter for Good
15 Budget-Friendly Organizing Hacks
The Cutest Storage Bins on Amazon
