How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets

by Dana K. White

Methods don’t clean your house. You have to clean your house.

Here’s what I had to accept: Cleaning my house is not a project. It’s a series of boring, mundane, repetitive tasks. The people whose homes are clean all the time do these boring, mundane, repetitive tasks.

I finally had to understand that there isn’t a better way. The only way to keep the dishes from piling up is to wash them. Really.

When the dishes are done every day (and other stuff, but mostly dishes), and dishes and other stuff are taking way less time than they did when they grew to Project Status, time opens up for other projects. Real projects. Ones I like. Like painting bathrooms, writing books, and letting my kids plant a garden in the

backyard.

There’s nothing to pep myself up about. There’s no decision to make.

To have a clean house, I have to clean it. That’s nowhere near as fun as reading about cleaning. I mean, duh.

I know cleaning has to be done. But because it isn’t a project, and it has no end, I put off starting.

Anything I have too much of, that consistently gets out of control simply because I have too much of it, is clutter.

Organizing is problem-solving. Problem-solving (especially when I’ve failed at exactly that over and over and over) is overwhelming.

When we moved into our house two years later, I purged a lot but held on to anything and everything that had any kind of potential for any possible future point in our lives. As an idealist, I love the word potential, and I couldn’t bear to get rid of something that had it.

I wanted my children to grow up with fond memories of simple things that are big in the mind of a child. The overabundance of stuff in my home was keeping me from being the mother I’d always dreamed of being.

When a space is decluttered, that space is comparatively organized. If I remove the things we don’t need, there’s nothing getting in the way of things we do need. We can function in that space. We can use it. And isn’t that the goal of organizing?

The Visibility Rule: When I feel the urge to declutter, I start with visible clutter.

Remember, people whose homes are always clutter-free prefer living with regret over living with clutter.

Stressing over the “best” way of doing something is totally counterproductive if that stress keeps you from doing anything at all.

Don’t get worked up over someone reselling your stuff. Either do the work to get the price you want, let someone give you money for taking your clutter, or give it away and stop worrying about it. Just don’t keep it in your house.

Over time, I’ve turned into a ruthless declutterer. I’m ruthless because I’ve experienced less, and I love having less stuff in my house.

I value open, livable space more than I value my stuff.

Things finally changed when I accepted this: the basics are the basics no matter the unique situation. A home that doesn’t have a system for dealing with the basics will consistently get out of control, no matter how much free time its inhabitants have. A home with systems in place for dealing with the basics can avoid Disaster Status even if its inhabitants are frazzled and overworked and exhausted.

I read books and asked questions and observed the homes of others, but only when I actually did the dishes every day did I understand how this habit (or nonnegotiable task or daily task or pre-made decision) worked.

Nodding your head in agreement or shaking it in disgust as you read a book or browse the Internet does nothing to improve your home. You are the only one who can improve your home, and you can’t know what works until you experience what works.

Once I established routines and experienced their amazing effect on my home, once I removed decisions and spent my energy on the most basic of daily tasks, I learned from experience that the work is so much less overwhelming when it is just the work alone, not the work plus internal conflict.

We slobs love big projects. We’re generally creative people who love to get consumed with something that will finish with a wow factor. Unfortunately, there’s not much of a wow factor in washing the dishes. But remember: the little things are more important than the big things. Not just as important, but more important.

Just remember why you started reading this guide. You wanted hope for your home. Unfortunately, hope isn’t as ambiguous as it sounds. It isn’t something that floats around in the sky until it settles on top of your head. It’s something you work for. It’s something you discover after you put in some work.

Doing the dishes is just something that has to be done, even if “doing the dishes” means throwing away the pizza boxes and paper-towels-used-as-plates. Sweeping the kitchen? Like I said on day 8, it’s not about sweeping the kitchen. It’s about paying attention to the floor and keeping your kitchen in a state where you can do what needs to be done in it. Without tripping. Checking the bathrooms for clutter? It’s visual. It’s paying attention. And if you’ve really been doing it, there might have been a day or two when looking into the bathroom was all you had to do. These things are the basics, the bare minimum. If you want hope, you’re going to have to accept that. They are not things you put off until Saturday. They’re things that need to be done every day. In every home.

The hope doesn’t come from what your house looks like after twenty-eight days. It comes from knowing what it takes to keep it looking that way every day.