How to keep your house clean?

[Plays With Life]

Originally Posted by Plays With Life

Here's how I organize: Take everything (EVERYTHING) and put it all (ALL) into one, huge, gigantic pile. Don't worry about grouping it, or making it nice. Just get it all into one place. All of it. Take EVERYTHING out of every closet, off of every shelf, out of every corner.

Just to add to this - this actually serves two purposes. One, it gets everything you're organizing out into the open. You can't organize your things if you can't see your things. And two, it empties every space, so that you can see all the space you have available. From that standpoint (I can see all my things, and I can see all my space), it becomes much easier to combine those two things to achieve organization.

[CoolBee]

PWL - let's just say I tried that method once and once only. Unfortunately about half an hour after getting the entire contents of a house into gigantic overspilling heap in the middle of my living room, I put my back out. And there they sat, depressing me and blocking the entrance to the kitchen and bathroom and rooms beyond for almost a month until my brother came and helped me just shove things back onto shelves and into cupboards any old how.

One shelf or one cupboard at a time - don't get out more than you can put away in an hour! (Because the other thing that happens is major sidetracking - eg reading the box of old love letters or going through the old photo albums you discover lurking!)

[Plays With Life]

Originally Posted by CoolBee

PWL - let's just say I tried that method once and once only. Unfortunately about half an hour after getting the entire contents of a house into gigantic overspilling heap in the middle of my living room, I put my back out. And there they sat, depressing me and blocking the entrance to the kitchen and bathroom and rooms beyond for almost a month until my brother came and helped me just shove things back onto shelves and into cupboards any old how.

One shelf or one cupboard at a time - don't get out more than you can put away in an hour! (Because the other thing that happens is major sidetracking - eg reading the box of old love letters or going through the old photo albums you discover lurking!)

Yeah, I wouldn't expect to get it all done in one sitting, or in one day. I would devote a week or two to getting everything organized. (Or more, if you have more stuff). It's a major project. It's like moving into a new house. You don't have your furniture set up, you don't have your things in convenient places - so you put your life on hold and devote some time to it. You tell people - oh, I'm in the middle of moving - I'll get back to you next week once I'm settled. Same thing here. You put your life on hold until it's all settled.

When you get your life organized, you're making a huge number of decisions. You're making decisions about where and how to use Every Single Item you own, and how to use Every Single Space you have. Of course that will take some time. A lot of those decisions will take a few days of mulling over. You need to walk by it (the item or the space) several times a day, every day, and let your mind consider all the possible approaches to it. It gives your mind a continual reminder of the item, and your mind will just keep considering, more and more deeply, all the possible approaches. Usually, for me, something just clicks. I suddenly just think - ah, yeah. That's the way to do it. If the item is put away, or the space is full, then my mind doesn't get those continual reminders - and that process never happens.

Sometimes you need to just try something - put it in one place, and live with it for a while. Use it in the way you've decided to test. You'll either recognize through using it that - Yeah, this is great. This is the perfect place / way to use this. Or you'll recognize - Oh yeah, it wasn't obvious when I was thinking about it, but there's actually this aspect that makes using it this way difficult. So you pull it out again, and go through the process again. Or you just try it in a new place right away.

The major sidetracking sounds like a benefit to me, rather than a detriment.

[ChrisGinsburg]

Something I've found very helpful for me is to tackle avoidable tasks first. In other words, when you go to clean do something you could easily put off first. It seems so simple but it creates a rhythm of getting much more done.

[cacheborn]

Just came across a different approach to cleaning in Leo Babauta's post. It's called clean as you go. I have been doing some of it, like washing dishes immediately. I think it's quite insightful.

Simple Systems: Clean Your House as You Go (with an added burst) :zenhabits

[ZephyrusX]

Thanks Cachy! I also 'clean as you go' to some extent. I try to keep the habit of putting things away if I'm done with them, but if I don't , I try to leave a room while picking up one or two things and putting them where they belong as I walk through the house. It makes things reasonably tidy most of the time.

Originally Posted by cacheborn

Just came across a different approach to cleaning in Leo Babauta's post. It's called clean as you go. I have been doing some of it, like washing dishes immediately. I think it's quite insightful.

Simple Systems: Clean Your House as You Go (with an added burst) :zenhabits

[cacheborn]

Originally Posted by ZephyrusX

Thanks Cachy! I also 'clean as you go' to some extent. I try to keep the habit of putting things away if I'm done with them, but if I don't , I try to leave a room while picking up one or two things and putting them where they belong as I walk through the house. It makes things reasonably tidy most of the time.

I also try to do it as often as I can, but nobody is perfect.
It makes sense to do it in little snatches instead of confronting a big, scary mountain.

[CoolBee]

This is very much Flylady's approach.
A 2 minute bathroom 'swish and swipe' everyday keeps the mighty-many-hour/day springclean away!

Clean it before it gets visibly dirty

[cacheborn]

Originally Posted by CoolBee

This is very much Flylady's approach.
A 2 minute bathroom 'swish and swipe' everyday keeps the mighty-many-hour/day springclean away!

Clean it before it gets visibly dirty

I think he gives credit to Flylady.
Yes, it seems quite effective.

[Aingeal]

I also used this method to a point, lol only problem is I have this incredibly annoying habit of starting 10 or so things at once and not actually accomplishing anything.

I have found however I do much better if I write up a list and keep crossing things off as I complete them...... Actually works really well :-)

[tod]

I'm not exactly a neat freak. I vacuum twice a year whether the carpet needs it or not.

What really bothers me is clutter. You know how you unplug your appliances and stuff before you leave on a trip, so the house doesn't burn down? Do you ever find yourself secretly wishing that your house would burn down, because then you wouldn't have to deal with your stuff ever again?

My preferred solution is to have less stuff to manage in the first place. Every now and then I have to wipe the slate clean. I sell a lot of stuff on eBay or give it away. Things I think I might want or need, but I'm not sure about, I put away and bring back when they're called for.

Sell or give away what you know isn't right for you, then pack the rest of it away and slowly bring back into your life what truly belongs there. Then dump the rest of it.

I've been going through this process lately. My life is very spare and functional right now. I'm surrounded primarily by things I use, to the point that my office now has scissors and pencils in it but no post-it notes or paperclips.

[cacheborn]

Just had an insight.

When you look at something in your house, your desk, the floor, kitchen sink and you think to yourself, "Do I need to clean it? It looks fairly okay." THAT is the time to clean it. If you maintain that, things will never get out of hand. This may seem obsessive but actually it's not. Otherwise things tend to pile up and get out of hand fairly quickly.

Nip it in the bud. It takes far less effort to maintain cleanliness.