1. Make the Beds
Make the beds in your household every day. When a bed is made, the entire room comes together, feels more in order. It encourages me to follow through with other needs in the room – clothes on the floor, shoes out of place.
Kaylee cannot leave the house before school without making her bed.
I even make the toddler beds. Not because tossing a baby quilt on top of a crib mattress will make any great difference in a room, but I do it so the boys will have practice making beds and a habit established in making their bed before their day begins.
2. Straighten the Bathroom
The night before I took this picture, I was exhausted. I bathed the boys, put them to bed, then crashed before 9:15. Consequently, I didn’t straighten the bathroom from the baths the night before.
Unfortunately for me, this is the view from my front door, so anyone coming into my house that morning would have seen, in their direct line of sight, my messy bathroom:
Under the clutter, the bathroom is clean. But you wouldn’t know it from a glance. It took me less than 2 minutes to straighten it up, including the time it took me to run a sponge over the sink.
It was 2 minutes that make a world of difference.
3. Empty the Dishwasher/Dish Drainer
If the first thing you do when you enter your kitchen in the morning, even before pouring that first cup of coffee, is to put the dishes away that were washed the night before, then what you have is a big, empty dish washing appliance that is just waiting to be filled up again. If it’s empty, then you can clean the kitchen all day long, throwing breakfast dishes and lunch plates into it without worry.
I have found that when I do not empty my dishwasher first thing, then the dishes pile up throughout the day, and when dinner is over and it’s time to clean the kitchen, the entire task from emptying the dishwasher to doing all day’s worth of dishes just seems daunting. And, honestly, I’m less likely to do it.
If nothing else gets done some days, I know that my bed is made, my bathroom could pass cursory inspection, and my kitchen can be cleaned in a wink.
