Love is not just a feeling, but an action, that we do daily to grow and persevere in our relationships. But showing love every day or in new ways, can get harder to do as time goes on simply due to the natural busy-ness of life and the world's strong pull to distract us from what is truly important.

Habit # 1 : Create & Follow a Cleaning Schedule

If there is one thing that will automatically help, is to write things down. Get either a weekly kind of notepad, or a whiteboard, and make some time to sit down and plan out what your home needs to get done on a weekly basis.

It's important to make this schedule entirely personalized to suit your lifestyle and working situation. You know which chores are best to do on which days. At the moment I'm a full time mom with a young baby, so the schedule I wrote up is only chores for me. However you can totally have your husband's or children's chores too.

The key is to make sure it's a schedule YOU can follow fairly easily and keep it simple. Don't overload it, leave room for the day-to-day items on your to-do list. Here is what mine looks like:

KITCHEN/DINING

Habit #2: Load Dishes Twice a Day

One of the saving graces of our kitchen is that we have a dishwasher. Both my husband and I have NO passion for washing dishes by hand (although if I had a beautiful large white sink in front of a window with a stunning tall tap, I wouldn't mind it half as much) so the dishwasher is a valuable commodity.

So every day, to keep clutter down (and also because we have limited kitchen supplies) I load the dishwasher throughout the day, usually once in the afternoon and again after dinner. It usually takes two days for it to get full, then the dishwasher does it's duty. Since we also have a small kitchen and sink, doing this keeps the sink and counters clear, which in turn makes it easier to wipe counters as well.


Habit #3: Change up Towels

Nothing brings down your willingness to clean your kitchen than gross icky towels and dish rags. So change them up every other day and wash once a week. I usually wash them with my towels since I like to use the hot water feature to really get stains out and kill bacteria.

Habit #4: Put Things Away After Use

I'm still trying to teach my husband this. When you make a peanut and jelly butter sandwich, don't leave obvious evidence behind. If you open a can, put the can opener back right after. It's simple and effective, whatever you use while cooking and prepping, put it back as soon as possible. This helps keep your counters free and clear and without every condiment and spice all over the place.

BATHROOM

Habit #5: Practical Proximity

Whatever you use most, keep it in places easiest to reach. This makes it so much easier to implement Habit #4 in your bathroom as well. After you put deodorant on, straighten your hair, or put primer on, make sure it's quick and easy to put away. Organizing baskets/makeup bags are key. I'm going to be honest, I do let myself slip on Habit #4 in the bathroom most days, but because I have a place for everything and it's super accessible, it takes me less than 5 minutes to make the bathroom look great!

Habit #6: Check for EEs - Expired and Empty

If you're like me, you're a bit hardcore budget-minded and so you stretch your products out as much as you can. Or, maybe you're the opposite and you find yourself buying new products regularly. Or maybe you buy in bulk a little too often...Either way, it can be hard to keep track of what has expired or is practically empty. Toss and be sure to add the item to grocery list if it's a product you love.

LAUNDRY

Habit #7: Keep Laundry Sorted

We all know we should wash darks with darks and lights with lights. But what if we had our laundry sorted before laundry day? How? Easy. And no, it doesn't involve the Sorting Hat. Get laundry hampers for different kinds of clothing. Or get the kind that already have separate sections, like this one we have. Throughout the week, toss your dirty darks into the designated darks hamper, and lights into the lights, and towels in the towel one, etc, and presto! You just saved 15 minutes of laundry sorting!

LIVINGROOM

Habit #8: Tidy Toys Daily

If you have super young children like me, they don't understand the concept of cleaning up yet. But if not, they should be doing this before their bedtime routing begins, maybe even before dinner depending on how things work in your home.

I like to do this right after my baby goes to sleep. A tip is to use baskets, they are THE BEST for organizing and putting toys away. Also, be mindful of how many toys are out and which ones rarely come out of the baskets. This will tell you A) maybe there are too many toys being brought over from their bedroom, and B) which toys are no longer getting played with.

Having a comfortable room, besides your bedroom, that feels like an "adult" room is a concept I took from "Bringing Up Bebe". It was an eye-opening moment of learning, and I love it!

Habit #9: Remove Migrating Objects

The living room is a bit of a catch-all location. A cup of water, a used tissue, a sock, maybe even a laundry basket. After you tidy the toys up, you can easily see what is there that doesn't belong. Promptly return them to their home or throw it out.

Habit #10: Clean Entrance Often

And the last habit is to keep the main entrance to your home free of gravel, shoes and bags. I vacuum every other day in the winter season, and honestly could probably do it daily to keep sand and gravel from trailing into the home and making the doorway/mudroom gross to walk on. It's also really easy to allow jackets and bags and shoes to pile up, so just before you vacuum, sweep or mop, make sure that all gets cleared up.

Do What You Can When You Can

You don't have to keep up with all of these habits ALL the time, or even integrate them into your lifestyle ALL at once. So don't beat yourself up if a room or two, or even your whole house, slips into a grimy state once in a while. A solid day or two of hardcore cleaning will bring it back to that comfortable standard again. But, we do want to try to avoid too many of these heavy cleaning days that can kind of suck (if you're like me and don't like to do them often...).

The idea is to create these habits overtime so that they become second nature, require a lot less thinking and overall help you save time and effort to keeping a clean and tidy home.


Hopefully something in this post was helpful to some of you! Which of these habits do you already do at home? How does your family help? Did any of these jump out as something you want to try to implement in your home? Let me know in the comments down below!