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

by Dana K. White

The goal of “28 Days to Hope for Your Home” is to guide you to develop four habits that will help you keep your home under control and out of Disaster Status.

If you choose to declutter, follow my Visibility Rule. Choose a small, highly visible space to declutter so you’re more likely to complete it before something happens to distract you, and you’ll be encouraged every time you walk by it.

Put away your clean dishes. Wipe down the counters/table.

We view that splatter as a personal attack.

Now wipe up that splatter, and let yourself feel foolish over your inner monologue.

Did you notice how it took all of three seconds or less to wipe it up because it wasn’t crusted yet?

But remember: the little things are more important than the big things.

Not just as important, but more important.

Check the bathrooms for clutter.

For today, ignore the ring around the bathtub. Ignore the smell. Just deal with the clutter.

Before you go to bed tonight, do the dishes and wipe down the counters/table.

Put away your clean dishes and wipe down the counters/table. Sweep the kitchen. Check the bathrooms for clutter. Throughout the day, put dirty dishes in the sink/dishwasher as they get dirty.

Do a five-minute pickup.

Take five minutes to pick things up.

Oh, and put them away too. All within the five minutes.

Look at the clock, or set a timer, and spend five minutes picking up. Personally, I would start in the most lived-in room.

Because it’s your first day for this habit, you may need to start with a trash bag. Just pick up trash for five minutes.

In my home, I have assigned a major cleaning task to each day of the week. I do laundry on Mondays, mop the kitchen on Thursdays, etc. But I

didn’t start doing that until six months into my deslobification process. During

those first six months, I randomly cleaned bathrooms or vacuumed. Yet my home was in better s...

small, daily habits are the key.

procrasticlutter.

Spend any remaining minutes on those things. Fold clothes until the five minutes are almost up, and then go put those clothes away. Like, in their drawers and everything.

If you, again, find yourself with three whole minutes left after you’ve picked up the from-yesterday-to-today stuff in your living room, go back to whatever you started tackling yesterday. Keep folding laundry. Just leave enough time to put it away before the five minutes are gone.

I know that the discouragement you feel is real. When no one takes your efforts to change seriously (not even your success in those efforts), you want to give up.

Just don’t let the discouragement win.

Keep going. Keep washing the dishes every night, and keep checking your ...

Enjoy how much easier it is to live in your home. Gain your encouragement from watching your family enjoy it, too, even if they ...

Are you irritated at spending those five minutes picking up everyone else’s stuff? If you’re doing this while everyone is at home with you, the five-minute pickup is an excellent habit to turn into a group task.

Put their stuff right inside the door to their room. The big clean-out-the-kids’-rooms project isn’t even on your radar yet. When they complain, you’ll remember to tell them you’d like them to put their own stuff away.

The bad part is I’ve realized there is no magic

fix.

No end to the dishes or the sweeping or t...

Thanks for living your everyday life inside my Slob Lab and loving me anyway.

Y’all make life fun and meaningful at the same time.

I’ve dealt with my own stuff. My own sentimental attachments. My own excessive need to be prepared for any and every scenario that could possibly happen between now and the day my great-great-grandchildren die.

I’ve learned how to get rid of things even though I wanted to keep them all.

I’ve consciously decided to view my home as a place to live instead of

a place to store all my great ideas and their...

I have an entire chapter about how deciding to donate instead of selling significantly accelerated my decluttering progress.

As long as you’re living, there will be new stuff coming in and old stuff that needs to leave.

And that’s fine. Accepting

this universal truth took me far in my own declu...

Decluttering isn’t organizing. When I realized decluttering and organizing were

two different things and that it was okay to just declutter, I felt a weight lift off my soul.

I

focused solely on getting things we didn’t need out of our house.

I define clutter as anything I can’t keep under control.

If a space in my home consistently gets out of control, I have too much stuff in that space. I have clutter.

I’ve accepted that while Decluttering Regret (the realization that I need something after I declutter it) isn’t fun, I’ve survived every time.