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Help. Feeling overwhelmed with the house
We have been living in our new house for 7 months now. Its easily twice as big as our apartment (or any of the apartments we have ever lived in). I work night shift (I'm a nurse) and am also in grad school. I feel like all I do is clean, but I don't feel like my house is clean. I feel like I am always picking something up and re-organizing. Its true I am very guilty of just throwing things onto either the ottoman or dining room table when I am working several nights in row b/c i am just exhausted after work.
Anyways, I feel overwhelmed with the work to keep the house clean and guest ready while getting the rest I need for work, taking time out to do my school work for grad school, spend time w/ DH and the dog, and trying to remain social with new friends/neighbors.
I would like to see/hear what others' routines are keeping their houses in tip top shape.
Re: Help. Feeling overwhelmed with the house
I'll be honest. My house is not usually "Company Ready."
Clean? Yes! Decently organized? Yes! However you'll always find a few dishes out, mail on the counter, my coat on a chair and general stuff of life out.
Clean enough to have friends over for beer and pizza but I'm not hosting Christmas dinner for the Pope anytime soon.
It happens and life is too short to worry about it.
What helps me keep things presentable is to clear the clutter and have a home for everything. Hooks anywhere you can stick them are great.
Also I clean as I see it. Every morning I make a list of 3 easy tasks and 2 more indepth ones. I get those done in less than 45 minutes and then move on. If I have more time I do more. If I don't well at least something got done.
I also streamlined my cleanin supplies. DIshsoap, vinegar, borax, a general spay and softscrub. So easy to grab and go and not have to dig.
I tried a cleaning checklist but all I did was feel like I was cleaning things that weren't dirty and wasting time.
Our issue is the mail sorting. I feel like when I'm not the first one home for a few days in a row, I lose control of the clutter.
How many credits are you taking for grad school? When I take 9 credits, I usually end up having some sort of meltdown mid-semester. When I take 6, I feel a lot better. Everyone is different. Can you cut back there?
OR instead of cutting back, can you organize your time better? I have a planner that lays out each week, by-the-hour. I need the hour-by-hour lay out so that I can specify time for studying, cleaning, cooking, driving, working, etc. If I block off three hours on Friday night for a date with DH, then I know that I'll need to do some cleaning in the morning and some studying on my lunch break. It helps me keep track of everything.
I also wake up an hour early. I shower and get ready, then I do the dishes and a little laundry. Then I don't feel rushed when it is time to go, and I feel accomplished and the house looks a little better. The down-fall is that I usually go to bed earlier than DH (who is stirring sugar into his coffee as he walks to his car... he prefers to sleep-in).
You might be a great candidate for a 15 minute (or so) cleaning challenge each night.
Set the timer for 15 minutes at night -- when you still have some energy -- and just commit to doing as much as possible in that period, and don't get distracted.
in 15 minutes, you can probably do one of these:
> Deal with the dishes and sort through the mail
> Wipe down the sinks counters in the bathrooms, maybe even do the toilets
> vacuum a room or two
> Dust the surfaces in a few rooms
etc.
If you commit JUST that amount of time every night, you'll be able to stay on top of lots of little things... and making the bigger cleaning less overwhelming.
And, heck, if after 15 minutes, you find you have more energy to do a little more, go for it!
I keep things picked up and put away daily. I keep the kitchen clean daily. I dust mop, sweep /or vacuumned the floors every other day. I do my bathrooms weekly, wipe down all switch plates, mirrors and sliding glass doors weekly. I then do a re-sweep/vacuumn before mopping, and dust all surfaces.
my house is also, NOT company ready regularly. a tip i like, invite company over, even if its just take and bake pizza and a movie on a regular basis, you will make yourself clean up every so often if you do. we throw parties just about every month, granted usually they are UFC watching parties in our home theater, not even in our apartment, but i make my home presentable to the other wives, just in case.
also, ditto on setting a timer, and i would try doing your 15 mins (or however long) when you first get home, youre still in a go go go mentality, before even sitting down, set the timer, tackle something, then "get off work" its a lot harder to stay working than to start working again.
also, i have employed some of these tips to save time when doing chores:
rather than folding socks and underwear, i have a drawer for each and i just toss them in the drawer as i fold laundry (do your panties really need to be folded?) (all my regular socks match each other, so i just grab 2, no need to ball them up, which stretches out the elastic. my fun or dress socks, theyre easy to match since there are so few, and they go on one side of the drawer).
also i fold it in the room it goes into. load of towels? i stand in the bathroom, doors to the linen cupboard open, putting them on their shelves as theyre folded. everything goes directly from the basket to shelf/drawer/hangers. i used to fold it on the couch, or dining room table, sometimes the stacks would go back into the basket, usually theyd get shoved it aside, so i can sit back, relax and not ever put it away.
for the mail, i switched to paperless billing for almost everything. junk goes directly into the recycling or paper shredder, magazines go in the basket by the couch, invitations/cards get magneted to the front door or fridge, everything is dealt with as i open them, except anything that needs filed, it goes in a basket in the office for another day. (ideally i would file them right away, well im not perfect.)
i air dry dishes, why spend energy/time drying with a towel when the air will do it for you?
same idea with soaking dishes, i fill the sink, add the water, then clean off counters and do any other kitchen cleaning that needs done, come back and the dishes are a lot easier to wash, i wash the easier ones first, so that the harder ones have longer to soak. if i have more than one sink full of dishes, i wash the less messy ones in the first sinkfull, so the dish water/sponge doesnt transfer more gunk onto them from the messier dishes.
also, i dont iron, hanging clothes in a not-too-tight closet right from the dryer helps prevent wrinkling, then my hubby or i hang our clothes in the bathroom while we shower, the light steam helps soften any wrinkles that do happen.
also i make sure everything has a temporary home. i have a catch-all bowl on my kitchen counter, a basket in the bathroom. and ottomens with storage in the livingroom, items go in the catch-alls, giving instant clean feeling just by gathering. when the catch all is full, i organize it, like 1x a week or less.
anyway, hope this helps, even if you simply find out youre not alone.
oh also, what does your hubby do? can you delegate some things to him?
I agree with what a lot of the PP's said, but I wanted to add something my mom, grandmother and great grandmother used to say: Always keep your front room and bathrooms clean.
Of course, that doesn't mean you just forget about the other rooms, but you focus on those two rooms. They said that you never know when someone may drop by and odds are, they aren't going to go into any of the bedrooms or the kitchen. I've "adopted" this idea and always pick up the LR first thing in the morning and make sure the bathroom is tidy. It makes me feel better and feels like we are "company ready" without having to have a perfectly clean home.
I feel your pain! Our house is open and it's small so every little bet gets used every.single.day. Our main floor is totally open so if company drops in or we invite someone over, they will see my living room, dining room and kitchen the moment they walk in.
I do set a time and do everything I can. I also enlist dh's help and he will work along side me for 15-30 minutes. It's great!
Mail gets dealt with immediately and dishes get put away immediately. Every night I was the dishes and set out breakfast stuff.
I vacuum two times a week, usually before work because it just takes 5 minutes and then I feel like something is done.
I do laundry over night and then toss it in the dryer when I get up. Again, sometimes I have time to fold it before I leave otherwise I do it as soon as I get home.
Our house is far from "guest ready" neat, but it's clean.
I think most of us know the feeling oh to well.
I'm a lazy person so is my DH however we found a system that does work.
When we can afford to hiring someone we do. But we don't use a company luck would have it my MIL cleans home for a living so she comes over 1 time a month to do the deep cleaning. our job is to keep it up.
What i found works best is 3 steps, This is mainly for cluttered homes like mine.
step 1. grab a trash bag (small or large) and as fast as you can grab all the trash in every room do not spend more then 5 minutes do not look for trash just anything that is on the surface of something. carry a note book with you so anything that you see that you wanted to do or need to do you can write it down. this will keep you from doing it then.
Step 2 - go through each room and take 1 item that don't belong and put it back. Now if you have 4 cups in your bedroom don't take 1 cup take the cups so 1 item could be 4 items but it's all cups. ( you can set up details but this is the basic templete) once you have it put it away.
Step 3 - pick the worse room in your house and spend 10 minutes in it decluttering and or cleaning.
I don't cook every night so i don't have dishes every night. but any night we cook we do clean up while we cook prior to eating or we will get the lazies and not do anything.
My mom use to clean house during commercial brakes and you would be amazed at how much you can get done 9 minutes every half hour.
My house is rarely company-ready. When we know we are going to be having people over, we divide and conquer cleaning/tidying the house until it's done. I usually post myself in the kitchen (where hand-wash only items have become stacked up in the sink) and the fianc? straightens the living room and kitchen.
Most of what helps us is loading the dishwasher after we eat (don't have to run it, but put dishes away as they become dirty), wiping down things if there is a mess (just doing it at the time it happens is better than scrubbing and scouring something that is dried and caked-on later), and having a little bit of a schedule (doing certain chores on a schedule, ex: vacuum every other week).
A lot of what would be helpful for you would be to clean up/stay tidy as you go... then it's not as big of a chore to do later. I don't know how much your other half helps around the house but it always helps us to rally clean together - both of us are doing it and having four hands on deck makes it go so much faster. Sometimes I even put on up-beat music to keep me going at a quick pace.