It amazes me how fast a house can get messy. We clean the house up for company to come over, and shortly thereafter it’s a mess again.

Mostly that’s due to having three young children. Kids just love to play, and that means messes happen. It just takes a moment to forget to ask that they clean up after themselves and the mess just increases from there.

Keeping the house clean is one of the challenges work at home moms deal with. They’re at home, and that means that right or wrong there’s this expectation that they have the time for housework too, and so their house should be nearly spotless. If only it were that simple!

I don’t keep a perfect house. Matter of fact sometimes the mess comes close to driving me crazy because no one cleans without me reminding them, or so it seems much of the time. But I do have some tips to keep things up at least somewhat respectably.

1. Don’t Stress the Mess

Some mess isn’t so bad. If the house is clean enough that you won’t be too embarrassed to let the kids have a friend over, it’s probably not that bad. Depending on how easily you embarrass about house clutter and chaos, that is.

So often my oldest has had a friend over and I’ll feel a bit bad about how the house looks, but their mom comments that her house is about the same or doesn’t say anything. That many people don’t keep a perfect house is something you can learn by visiting your children’s friend’s parents when the kids go to play.

You want things clean enough to be healthy and safe. That doesn’t take perfect, dust free surfaces and constant scrubbing.

2. Get the Kids Cleaning

Kids can start cleaning pretty young. My oldest two are regularly assigned to empty the dishwasher, clear the table, sweep and mop the kitchen floor, clean two of the bathrooms and their own rooms. Plus toy general pickup, of course. Laundry assistance will soon be added to the oldest’s list

It takes time to teach kids to do a new chore correctly, and it’s harder than doing it yourself. I often have to help them get the sweeping or mopping done correctly, but they improve over time and eventually they won’t need help at all.

All other adults living in the home should be helping to clean as well.

3. Quick Cleaning Spurts

You may not have time to really get into the details of cleaning your home every day, but you can probably spare 5-15 minutes here and there to get some work done. That’s time enough to load and unload the dishwasher. Time to sweep or vacuum one room. Time to pick up some clutter.

4. Declutter

One of the biggest sources of messy homes after children is clutter. If you have a lot of stuff, it’s harder to keep it all clean. Simple as that. Take some time and get rid of the stuff you don’t need, and organize the rest.

5. Decide If You Can Afford a Cleaning Service

A cleaning service can work wonders for getting all the cleaning done that is so hard to get to. You still have to have your house generally tidy for them, but they’ll take care of cleaning surfaces, sweeping, mopping, dusting, vacuuming, stuff like that. It can be really nice to have someone else scrub down your bathroom for you.

You don’t need to keep your home absolutely perfect. Most of us don’t manage that. Clean enough to be healthy, messy enough to be happy is more fun than perfection.

The post How Do You Manage the Mess? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

One nice thing about moving was getting all the stuff off my desk. Finally a reason to just throw all the stuff that somehow ended up on my desk into a box.

Most of it’s still there, so why is my desk cluttered again?

Mostly it’s paper, and I know who’s to blame. There’s a second grader in this house, and guess where all her school work ends up when she gets it back?

Ok, ok, I could give it back to her after I look at it. Blame it on me. Really. Just go ahead.

A little of the clutter has to do with bills received as I work toward making all our bills go on auto pay. Once all that’s settled I won’t have to worry about keeping track of who’s been paid.

And I suppose I can throw out the catalogs for the school fundraiser now that it’s over. No point in being tortured by those pictures of cookies anymore. The cookie dough will get here when it gets here, in late October.

I know I’m not the greatest at keeping paper clutter under control, but I do still have a few tips for managing it.

1. Have a safe place for bills that need to get paid.

Don’t let these get buried in the clutter. Put them someplace where you’ll find them in time to pay them. Get on auto pay if you like… I love it. Even pay them as soon as the bills come in if that’s what it takes. Just don’t lose track of any of your bills.

2. Have a safe place for checks that need to be cashed.

Motivation to get these taken care of quickly should be even greater than that for paying bills. But sometimes checks sit a little until I can make it to the bank. Giving them a safe place to sit ensures that I don’t lose any and need to ask for them to be reissued.

3. Give it back.

I’m not so good at this one, as I noted above. I really need to give my daughter the chance right away to decide if her school work is kept or recycled.

We don’t have it up yet, but we have enough wall space here that we’re planning on putting up a board for each kid to put up their favorite artwork and school work. Gives them a place to show off rather than leaving it buried for all time. At least until the boards fill up, as they will.

4. Make friends with the recycle bin.

I just need to get faster about this one. Papers need to go more quickly into the recycle bin than I tend to send them. My desk wouldn’t be half so cluttered if I would make a quick decision as papers come along.

5. Get it filed.

I put this last because really, there aren’t that many papers coming in that I need to keep in a file. Doing that means it will probably stick around FOREVER. Move after move after move. There aren’t that many papers that really need to be kept.

Business records, financial records, important school papers, yes. Every little message from the school, no. You know the stuff you want to keep.

Maybe eventually I’ll be better about keeping the paper to a minimum on my desk. For now all I can do is keep on trying.

At least my habits in this area can’t get much worse. Well, they could, but that would be quite the disaster.

The post Where’s All This Paper Coming From? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

The trouble with home offices is that they are often a mess. In my experience, it is easy to feel like it is more important to work than to straighten up my office. There are just so many more things I could be doing and they seem more profitable than handling the inevitable clutter.

But the time always comes when the job must be done. I have to clean my home office. And so I will share my tips for it with you.

Papers are one of the worst items for cluttering an office. It doesn’t matter if you do your business 100% online, somehow paper appears anyhow. Check stubs, random stuff you’ve printed, mail someone else dropped in your office for some unknown reason. And it just tends to sit, unfiled or not in the trash can.

As you can guess, the first step is to sort through all those papers sitting on your desk or elsewhere in your office. If you don’t have a good filing system set up, make one! There will come a time when you will need one or another piece of paperwork, and if it is filed you will have a much easier time finding it.

Now, look at everything else in your office. What really belongs in there? Is it in the most sensible location for it?

Having kids, toys often end up on my desk. Just random stuff, generally small, but they do get in the way of working. Then there are the random computer accessories that are rarely used and really don’t belong on my desk.

You may have things like printer cartridges sitting about. Think about the right place to keep them; easily accessible for when you need them, but not where they’re taking up space on your desktop.

Look at your work setup, especially those areas where you do most of your work. Are they comfortable? Reasonably ergonomically set up? If you’re having to stretch to reach things all the time or if you’re having concerns about carpal tunnel or similar problems, you probably need to work on the way you have your office set up. The better you can manage this the more productive you will probably be during your work hours.

Check your office for any other problems. A cluttered home office can feel comfortable but it can also limit your effectiveness as you work. You may be surprised at how quickly you can fix clutter issues, especially once you have a good filing system. A little bit of time invested can help you to be more productive overall.

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