It can be easy to start feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated when it comes to keeping up with your cleaning and organizing around the house. Here are three of my favourite homemaking shortcuts that always help me get my head back in the game!
Summertime can be a pretty intense time when it comes to keeping up with things around the house. Schedules are full of all kinds of adventures, kids are home from school, and routines pretty much go out the window. It can be hard to get a grip on things the way we can throughout the rest of the year because our days are just so unpredictable. And that’s part of the fun of summer! It can be a little stressful too though when the clutter starts to take over and the last thing you want to do is spend a day digging through it all. I thought right now would be the perfect time to share a few little tricks I use for these hectic times when routines are out of order to make myself feel excited and motivated to get my house tidied up so I can get back outside!
Of course, the thing with cleaning and organizing tasks is that once you actually start working on them, they never take as long as you thought they were going to. You just have to actually do them, right? It can be hard to make yourself want to do them though, and this is what today’s post is all about. It’s funny how it works, but if you can make yourself feel like you’re already doing a pretty amazing job with this homemaking stuff, you’ll just want to keep going with it. It just all becomes easier. So consider these your shortcuts to that feeling. 🙂
Homemaking Shortcuts: Light a Candle
There’s just something about a house that smells great that makes it feel instantly cleaner and more well taken care of. I always try to remember to light a candle if I feel like my home is getting a little crazy and it never fails to just completely change the atmosphere. In my book The Cleaning Ninja, I made sure to make lighting a candle the very first step in the process for getting your home company ready in 8 minutes flat (Chapter 1!) and it’s still my very first step in almost any cleaning process that I undertake!
If store bought candles aren’t really your thing, you can always make your own or you can use something like essential oils in a diffuser to give your home a light, fresh scent. You can find some of my favourite summertime essential oil diffuser recipes here.
Or you can always bake my quick 3 Ingredient Chocolate Zucchini Cake. The smell of that wafting through the house will definitely give you plenty of happy homemaker vibes. 🙂
Homemaking Shortcuts: Cleaning Should be a Sport
I’ve mentioned before how I love to play little games to keep myself moving and feeling challenged while I’m going about the most tedious of household tasks. Lately though, I’ve been treating my cleaning time more like a sport! 🙂 I’ll start the stopwatch on my phone and treat each little task that I have to complete as one “lap” and I’ll aim for a certain time for each lap, the same way you would aim for a certain pace when you’re running laps around a track. So I’ll make my list of ten tasks, maybe aim to get them done in 2 minutes each, and then I’ll just hit the “lap” button on my phone as I complete each task.
When I’m all done everything, I can look back over my times and see if I managed to hit around 2 minutes for each! The fun part about doing it this way is that by the time you’re done everything, you’ve accomplished quite a bit in a small amount of time, and because you don’t take a break between tasks, you actually end up getting a bit of a workout in too! 🙂
Just another fun way to break up the monotony of doing the same things day after day!
Homemaking Shortcuts: Count Your Homemaking Blessings
It never hurts to play a little game of “Well, at least I’m not them!” Nothing is more motivating than when you feel like you’re already doing an awesome job. When you feel like you’re good at something, it’s only logical that you just want to keep going. You’ll probably even find yourself wanting to get even better! My favourite way to put myself in that mindset when it comes to cleaning and tidying up is to watch a show called “How Clean is Your House?” Have you heard of it? It’s like my secret weapon when it comes to feeling awesome about the job I do around the house. It’s an older show and it’s from England, but it was super popular in its day and you can find lots and lots of full episodes on YouTube now.
Basically, they take people who have houses that are absolutely disgusting and help them learn how to clean them properly. I love that this show is so realistic. You won’t find any high budget full-home makeovers on this show. The homes literally just go from filthy to clean and the decor and style of the home stay basically exactly the same. The way that the people making the show and the homeowners describe the “afters” though is just so positive and refreshing. You’ll find yourself thinking “Wow! My home’s already cleaner than that and I haven’t even started power cleaning yet!” And you’ll find yourself feeling awesome and in the mood for some serious quality cleaning time. It never fails!
I dare you to watch an episode of this show and not end up with a smile on your face and a feather duster in your hand. 🙂
Do you have any other little homemaking shortcuts that you use to make yourself feel like you’ve got it all under control?
MORE IDEAS LIKE THIS
- The Five Finger Trick for Controlling Clutter
- The Curtain in the Dryer Trick
- How to Clean Really Tarnished Silver Naturally
- Ten Handy and Inventive Uses for Baby Powder Around the House
- The Laundry Basket in the Trunk Trick
- The Creek Line House Homekeeping Tips and Tricks Archives
This post contains affiliate links.
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.