Is your home suffocating you? Do you feel like you’re living in a place where a bomb went off? Then your home could be a leak in your life. An over cluttered unclean home crushes your productivity, your emotional and mental health along with your ability to be a good mom.

Your home should be your safe haven, a place for rejuvenation. But as modern homemakers who do so much more than cook and clean, we need to give up the antiquated idea of how to keep house. There really are so few little teeny tiny simple things that you need to adjust to make this a reality for you. Follow along and I will walk you through what you can do as a busy mom to start you on the path of how to declutter, clean, and organize your home.

Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast

FUNCTIONAL, SIMPLE, UNIFORM

I first want to talk about the philosophy I use in the Systemize Your Life Academy called FSU which stands for functional, simple, and uniform. It’s a philosophy I use to help me declutter my home and a process I put everything in my home through.

It is also a common thread among the professionals such as Martha Stewart, Marie Kondo, and Joanna Gaines. They all love simplicity, and things to be functional and uniform.

For you, this might mean getting rid of things that other people want you to have because they are sentimental. I’ve said no to a lot of stuff that has been in the family for a trillion years because they simply don’t bring me joy. I’ve been guilted for this but I’m trying to rid my heart and my mind of any kind of negative thought processes. I want my brain to be functioning in a space of gratitude as often as possible which means not having things that make me frustrated to look at.

So with this philosophy, we will jump into decluttering and what you can do to give yourself the freedom that you need inside your home when it comes to clutter. This is the first step for a reason.

DECLUTTER

We live in a constant state of gluttony, we always want more. The FSU philosophy is really what helps me curtail that when I go into Target and I’m like “Oh my gosh this makes me feel aaamazing!” Well, is it functional? Is it simple? Is it uniform and does it fit with all the other things in my house? If the answer is no it shouldn’t be at my house. You should be doing this with every item in your home.

Thinking of every single space and thing in your house can feel overwhelming but don’t worry I have a system for this! It’s called the ‘Escape Method.’ There is even an amazing workbook inside the Systemize Your Life Academy for this. It is called ‘Escape Your Clutter and Live Mess Free.’ It has a worksheet for every single space in your house.

It helps you identify what your goals are for the space, what is one thing you could do to make it more functional, simple, and unified. I have a section in there of everything that I recommend to have in that space and what I have in my own space.

But, this is something that you can do on your own. First of all, identify every single space in your home and which are the ones causing you the most problems. Start making goals for that space and how you can make it more functional, simple, and uniform.

Here are a couple of tips that I want you to write down right now for you to be able to declutter your home.

GOODWILL BIN

The first one is something that I absolutely love. The Goodwill bin. I have a Goodwill bin in multiple areas of my home. I have one upstairs, one downstairs, and one in the garage. Anytime we pick up something and we go to put it away but we know that it’s not going to adhere to the FSU philosophy we just put in the bin. It fills up all the time. Our goal in this house is to be getting rid of more things than we are bringing in so that we can begin to truly start living a more minimalist life. Here’s the other thing I do to help me declutter.

MAKE TIME FOR DECLUTTERING

I assess each space in my home regularly. There should be a rhythm happening in your home with this. If there is not you will see it when things are spewing out of closets and drawers can’t be shut. Some of our rhythms are going through our closets when the seasons change. You should have a capsule wardrobe with your clothing to make this so much easier. If you don’t know what that is, we have several posts on this and a FREE guide in our Facebook group.

We also change our outdoor play equipment in the garage when the seasons change. We go through the girls rooms and all our toys around Christmas and birthdays every year. The girls know that every toy must have a home, and that doesn’t mean sitting up against the wall.

So once you have a decluttered house you can move on to the second part.

KEEP AN ORGANIZED HOUSE

This is when the U of FSU really comes into play. Once you are decluttered you can start to make everything in your home uniform. You can get colored baskets and group like things together and situate things in a way that is functional.

If you have little kiddos rearrange your house that it fits the functionality of having young children. Keep things down low for them that they need.

One thing I want you to know it there is no right way of doing this. Stay away from Pinterest. For me, I started with the Dollar Store and lots of cardboard boxes. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It has taken me many iterations to get spots like my pantry down. Please know, it doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated.

Okay, let’s dive into the third portion of making sure you can care for your home.

“Identify every single space in your home and which are the ones causing you the most problems. Start making goals for that space and how you can make it more functional, simple, and uniform.”

HAVING A CLEAN HOME

Podcast episode 64 goes way deeper into this. What I want you to take away today is that you need to make it simple. I have 3 cleaning products I use. My two main ones are my multipurpose spray made from Young Living thieves and then a soft scrub cleaner from Sprouts. I also have a window cleaner. I clean everything with these and it makes it super simple.

Guys this list is strategic. You have to do these in order. In order to deep clean your house, it needs to be decluttered and then organized. To get my house clean, I use zone cleaning. Zone cleaning is everything. I go over how to do that in detail in episode 64. It is basically cleaning my entire house in a month by breaking it up into four sections and cleaning one zone a week.

Alright onto my last step for you to help maintain your home.

TIDY ROUTINES

This is a tough one for a lot of you. This one comes down to your time management, hands down. If you feel like at the end of the day you are picking up the house by yourself, that is the last thing I want to encourage you to do. So instead of that, I want you to create a tidy routine.

I want you to really look at a space in your house that is untidy and figure out the trigger that is causing that. If it is your bathroom vanity at the end of the day then the reason is probably that you are not giving yourself enough time to get ready in the morning. If you have to be ready at noon you probably need to tell your brain you need to be ready at 11:50 so you have that time to clean up your makeup.

You also need to teach this to your children. Teach them to clean up the Play-Doh before they move on to play with their puzzles. We all need to train our brains with these things so our house can be tidy all day long.

If you want a deeper resource on this you can go way back to podcast episode 15. It will go a little bit deeper into all this.

Okay, I have given you a lot today. Pick which one of these four portions of working on your home is hardest for you. Is it clutter, organization, deep cleaning, or just maintaining and keeping a tidy home? Chunk it up and tackle it little by little.

I would love to hear about it inside the Facebook group. I also know that there are some of you that are super super ready to get this done like you want to make changes in order to fully manage your home plus your motherhood and business and be super-efficient. If that is you come to find out more details on the Systemize Your Life Academy. Thanks so much for joining me today, I look forward to supporting you on this journey!

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you have any resources to help with creating a schedule?

Sure do! Part of my weekly schedule involves scheduling fundamental needs – one of these is cleaning! If you want to learn more about your fundamental needs, start with this workbook.