Housekeeping Routines

I am constantly trying to figure out how to better take care of this little corner of the world God has blessed us with. I write copius lists and try very hard to stick to routines only to find that they don’t fit in well with trying to learn at home and manage two active 17 month old twins.

I have a bit of a perfectionist mentality when it comes to cleaning and that can be a bit defeating. The fact is that in a small house that has few closets and nine people living in it there is going to be…

• very little time to clean
• very little hope that when something is clean it will stay that way
• a high level of frustration for mom

I don’t function well in disorder.  Unfortunately the twins love disorder and spend a large amount of their seemingless endless supply of energy creating it.  Sigh.

We also have another "housekeeping challenge" on the horizion.  Within the next few months we will be tearing off the top floor of our house and building on a bigger top floor with an attic (let me assure you I am jumping up and down with glee).  We will also be expanding our dining room and adding a foyer to the front of the house.  Every single aspect of this cnstruction has been designed to provide us (me really) with a more functional living space. I’m getting a master bathroom with a linen closet (thank you Lord!) and bunch more closets, bigger bedrooms, a large coat closet in the foyer, an attic space and a large linen closet for the kid’s rooms.

This is all very exciting and terrifying. We will be living here during the 5-6 month construction.  All of the children’s bedroom furniture and our dining room furniture will have to go into storage as well as a lot seasonal items stored in our garage. The back of the garage is going to become part of a dining room.  We will be living in a living room, two very small bedrooms, the kitchen and our basement playroom/learning room.

EEEK!

With all of this going on I need to focus on decluttering and simplifying my routine. 

Decluttering, I’m ok with.  I have developed a deep hatred of stuff over the last few years. We just have too little space to form deep attachments to stuff.  If it isn’t truly useful, meaningful or beautiful it goes.  With each item I try to picture if I will still want it to be part of my life in fifty years. If not. Gone.  This may seem extreme and it is and I expect when I am past the "babies pulling stuff off the shelves" stage of my life I’ll change. A bit. Maybe.

My only downfall in the stuff department is the accumulation of books.  Like many homeschool moms I have waaaaay too many so that will have to be addressed. Any ideas?

So my thoughts on housekeeping in 2008…

This year I am going to identify what is really important to me and to the maintenance of the house and focus on those chores first. Since I don’t care for mess or diisorder picking up the learning room, kitchen and bathrooms is first. Vacuuming is also big with me.  I enjoy vacuuming and since we have a high level of traffic it’s really necessary.

I was all set to start typing up daily lists and then I saw on a few blogs this week the Motivated Moms website. Ater checking it out I purchased the Motivated Moms chore planner. It was very similar to the lists I was working on but this more appealing looking and at $8.00 it was certainly affordable. I printed out the 55 pages and clipped them to my clipboard. Well not all of them, I left off the cover ;). The clipboard floats around the house with me and I found the MM chores to be fairly comprehensive. All of the cleaning chores that make me happy when they are accomplished are on the list everyday.

On the daily lists there are chores that can be farmed out to willing (or unwilling) children and will go a long way toward helping me keep the chaos at bay. When someone is at a loose end I can refer them to my clipboard.

I’m really excited about this.

So what is your housekeeping routine?