As a mom, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the day-to-day of raising kids and maintaining your busy household. Maintaining a clean home can be extremely hard between working, cooking dinner, and driving to all those activities and events! And, believe us when we say, an untidy home can totally amplify those feelings of stress and anxiety.
Maintaining a clean home is something we all strive for. But, achieving our house cleaning goals can be super difficult while raising messy children of any age. So, today we’re sharing some home cleaning tips that will save time, give you back your home, and restore peace in your life!
20 Quick Cleaning Tips for Busy Moms
Keeping your house clean shouldn’t be something that takes up all of your evenings and weekends. We believe that you can maintain a tidy home, spend time with your family, keep up with your schedule, and get a good night’s sleep with these quick cleaning tips!
So, here are our top 20 cleaning tips for busy moms like you!
Stock up on cleaning supplies.
Keeping cleaning supplies on hand is a great way to help you develop good cleaning habits. When you need to clean a space or item, you don’t want to open a cupboard and realize you don’t have the right tools to do the job. This can prolong cleaning that thing for days or even weeks!
Keep your cleaning supply arsenal fully stocked at all times! Even those products you use less frequently like certain stain removers, oven cleaner, or a pumice stone. When it comes to products you use all the time like paper towels and dish soap, don’t be afraid to buy in bulk!
Position supplies where needed.
If you have multiple bathrooms or a newborn that’s always spitting up, you don’t want to constantly be fetching your needed supplies from a single location. When you have to travel all around the house to get the supplies you need, you’re more likely to just let it be. Keep cleaning supplies where you use them, rather than in a single location. This way, you can attack the problem right away! We like these organizers for under the sink!
Put function first.
When you’re looking to tidy up, walk around your house and try to identify areas that regularly get cluttered and messy, and see if there’s a basket, hamper, or trash can you can add to keep it clutter-free! Consider first what is functional, and don’t worry about the appearance or social norms. Many retailers sell these items in cute designs and at a good price, so you can disguise the trash can, hamper, or whatever you need with a stylish version fit for your space!
Do your kids always take off their socks at the door with their shoes? Add a small hamper right in the entryway. If toys always explode on the living room floor, put a toy chest nearby. If your spouse can’t seem to walk down the stairs to throw his soda cans away, put a trashcan in his office. Have a pet that sheds? Leave a pet hair remover on your coffee table! It’s that easy!
Develop a routine.
Developing a cleaning schedule for working moms or stay-at-home moms is no easy task. But, a daily cleaning routine can help give you the peace and confidence you need to keep up with your household duties.
Your daily cleaning routine should always include removing trash and clutter and cleaning a few needy places. Once a week, you should also schedule a deep clean of areas and items often neglected. This might include dusting the whole house, cleaning all the windows, or scrubbing the floors. Making both daily and weekly plans will ensure your house always feels clean and controlled!
Delegate tasks to family.
You are not alone in your busy home! (If you were, it’d be a lot less messy, right?) There are lots of age-appropriate chores children can do and don’t forget that your spouse can help too! For the best results, make sure the tasks and expectations are clear for each person before they get to cleaning. You can also make cleaning fun by playing some music or making the chore list a race! This will help your family enjoy time cleaning while also developing valuable life skills.
Purchase time-saving tools and gadgets.
There is no shame in spending a little extra money to give yourself a little more time and peace! Saving even just a few minutes here and there can be super valuable to busy moms like you! So, don’t be afraid to purchase some tools that can help make some of your tasks a bit easier or a bit faster!
A robot vacuum is a great choice for moms who find themselves constantly battling crumbs, pet hair, or other sweepable messes. If you have pets, consider a self-cleaning litter box or puppy pad! If you’re looking for something a little more bidet-friendly, even something as simple as a blind brush or toilet bowl stick-on cleaner can save you lots of valuable hours with your family!
Complete tasks that pile up every day.
Everyone has that task that they really hate doing, which usually means it’s the one that piles up the fastest! For most people, it’s either dishes or laundry! Whichever it is for you, try to do those tasks every day.
Always do a couple of loads of laundry all the way to completion (putting it away too!) and finish the dishes completely before going to bed. Doing this will prevent too much from mounting and seeming overwhelming! After a while, it will just become routine.
Clean while cooking.
Try to unload your dishwasher before you start cooking. That way, as you cook, you can drop in your items right away! Keep a dishrag and trash can close by too, so you can wipe away messes and toss away the trash. Now, that task of doing the dishes every day doesn’t seem so daunting!
Consider cleaning when meal planning.
You have probably heard a lot about meal planning. Meal planning is not only a great way to save money by avoiding fast food, but it’s also a great way to head into your week feeling prepared and stress-free!
But – fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and veggies on soccer night? That’s a big mess on a busy night! When you’re meal planning, consider how the meal will work for your evening’s schedule. Put leftovers or one-pan meals on busy nights and save the big buffets for the weekend.
Simplify your products.
One way to keep a tidy household is to simplify your processes. Rather than a special cleaner for the bathroom, kitchen, garage, and living area consider getting concentrated amounts of all-purpose cleaning solution, glass cleaner, and a few other essentials, like white vinegar. Then, purchase some reusable spray bottles, fill them, and label them. This will make it easier for your family to help you clean since the process will be simpler. It also means fewer trips to the cleaning cabinet for the right products and fewer trips to the store to keep all those items in stock!
Throw things away.
Purging is a super important part of keeping a tidy home! Every day or once a week, take a trash bag and do a purge of discarded mail, graded homework, trash, broken items, or anything else that just needs to go!
Keep a donation box handy.
If it’s wasteful to throw the item away, don’t put it back in its place where it will just sit unused again! Instead, keep a designated donation box or basket somewhere all the time. Anytime you come across something that needs to go, throw it in there. When it fills up, take it to the car, and donate it that same week!
Multitask.
You’re a mom, you got this one! Combine picking up the house with another task to save time! You can tidy up while on the phone. You can lunge from area to area, picking up trash, and get your daily workout in. Or, if your baby likes to contact nap in their carrier, take that opportunity to do some dusting!
You could also clean while you take one of our car seat courses! Once you purchase a course, you can go back as many times as you want to review or rewatch things you might have missed while tidying up.
Contain the mess to a few spaces.
Do you find that your mess stretches from room to room throughout the day? Maybe your kids play in the living room, do crafts at the table, have a snack in the kitchen, and then build a fort in their bedrooms. By the end of the day, the whole house seems to be a disaster!
If you can, try to consolidate a lot of the daily activity into one or two spaces. This might mean moving toys into the living room or having a snack on the couch. But, if the mess is contained in one room, it’s a lot less overwhelming to clean up at the end of the day!
Don’t put things down, put them away.
This is something we’re all guilty of! Once you’re done using something, try to resist the urge to just put it down, even if you are going to come back to it later. Instead, put it away!
If you’re taking off your shoes, but might go out again later, still put them on the shoe rack. Or if you’ve read an article in your magazine and are coming back to it, still put it away on the shelf. This will prevent you from having to pick up as many things at the end of the day!
Pickup multiple times a day.
Picking up only takes a long time when we let clutter grow. Try to schedule a few quick cleans throughout the day where you pick up your child’s toys or sweep up the high-traffic areas. This way, by the end of the day, you’re dealing with just a few hours’ worth of clutter rather than what’s accumulated over the whole day or week!
Think about scent.
The scent does a lot for your atmosphere and as with any family, there are going to be some odors! Consider putting an essential oil diffuser in your main living space or adding automatic air fresheners around the house! You can set these and forget them!
Start with your most occupied space.
Our goal with this list is to make you feel at peace and as stress-free as possible! With your busy schedule, it doesn’t make sense to expect yourself to have every room immaculate by the end of every day. No way!
We recommend prioritizing the spaces that are mostly occupied by you. This might be your office, the kitchen, and the living room. Once you identify your spaces, ensure you’re keeping up with those rooms before the kid’s rooms or the basement bathroom no one sees!
Prioritize tidiness over organization.
Though watching Marie Kondo or The Home Edit might give you lots of inspiration for a clean and organized house, let’s start with clean. Sometimes the pressure of organizing only adds to our feelings of stress and contributes to more clutter.
First, find an area that collects a lot of stuff. Once you find a source of clutter, add a storage solution for that clutter right there, even if it means those items are in two separate spaces or not organized as well as you like.
One good example is toys! Though you have a playroom, maybe the kids drag their toys to the living room. If it’s too much of a chore to take those toys back to the playroom, add a toy chest to the living room! It’s okay if that means the toys are in different places and maybe just thrown into some big open bins. It keeps clutter from the floor and surfaces, which will make the whole house feel so much tidier!
Don’t forget about your car.
Do you spend a lot of time in your car commuting? If so, don’t neglect your car when adding quick cleaning systems to your life! Keeping an organized car will make carpooling and pickups that much more anxiety-free! Keeping a designated space for trash in your car and giving each kid a place for their essentials are just two of a whole list of great tips we have on car organizing in this post here!
Give yourself grace.
Momma, you’re so busy! Chances are your kids, your spouse, and your guests won’t see the dust flecks and little bits of clutter that you do. Understand that some days will be better than others, and there will still be plenty of times you’ll go to bed with a mess somewhere, and that’s okay! Progress is progress, no matter how small! You got this!
Keeping your house clean doesn’t have to be stressful!
When the going gets tough, just remember that countless studies have shown that keeping a tidy environment can positively influence your mental health. So, cleaning your home isn’t all about appearances. Getting control of your space will relieve your stress as well as promote the accomplishment of all your home cleaning goals!
Here at Safe in the Seat, we hope these tips have helped you relax and get control of your busy household. Go ahead and implement your new routine, but know that it will take a few tries to get it to stick. As with many other things in life, it will take some time to figure out what works for you and your family. But, with consistency and determination, you will have a clean and tidy home in no time!
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