How to Keep Your House Clean

Last updated on June 22nd, 2025 at 03:00 pm

As a mom of three, I’ve learned that it’s really easy to get overwhelmed by your house. If you’re not taking the right steps to manage and clean your house, it can become too much too fast. So, the best thing to do is develop a routine and habits that help you stay on top of things. Over the years, I’ve learned how to manage and clean my house in a way that works for us. Hopefully, you’ll find these tips helpful if you’re feeling like you just can’t stay on top of the mess!

Clean your house as you go

This is something my mother taught me. You should always clean up as you go so things don’t get too overwhelming all at once. For example, as you’re making breakfast, you should be picking up bits and pieces as you cook/prepare. If you take something out of the cabinet, put it away when you’re done. If you’re waiting for something to cook, wash a few dishes that you’re done with. When you’re doing a load of laundry, put it away right after it’s done so you’re not putting away three loads at once.

Cleaning up as you go means that you’re not ever dealing with a pile up. If after breakfast, you’ve got a sink full of dishes, a dirty counter, and ingredients all over the place, that’s going to feel like a much bigger mountain to climb than it would if you were picking up as you went.

Make cleaning fun

Yeah, it’s cleaning, which isn’t too exciting. But there are ways to make it more fun. For me, that’s always music. When I’ve got something with a beat to dance to as I go, it’s way easier to keep going. What music works for you might look a little different. You might need calming music to get into the zone. Whatever works.

There are other ways you can add some fun too. Make a game of it. For every task you complete, you get points toward a fun thing for yourself or reward yourself at the end of the day for everything you’ve done.

Set a timer and just get done what you can

Seriously, you would be surprised how much you can get done in only fifteen minutes. If you’re staring at all the work you need to do and you’re feeling overwhelmed, just set a timer and see how much you can get done. Once you get that momentum going, you might find that you can even keep going after fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes is usually enough to make a good dent in whatever household task you need to complete.

Use a system to manage things and assign tasks

So, I use Milanote to keep track of my to-do list, and I’ve used Asana in the past. Both of these have free versions that you can take advantage of, and they also both have apps that you can use on your phone.

They’re a great way to keep notes, and you can even assign yourself tasks. If you’re someone who gets a rush of dopamine from checking things off, this might be a great way to motivate yourself. It’s also just a great way to keep tasks organized. Milanote is a bit more flexible when it comes to keeping notes and designing boards, and Asana is better for things like recurring tasks/a calendar.

I would recommend trying them out and seeing if either works for you.

Keep things off the floor

This is another tip that I learned from my mother. She’s a big proponent of keeping things off the floor. Everything should be stored away or hung up except for the obvious like furniture. When you have baskets or backpacks or random items on your floor, it’s easy to feel cluttered and overwhelmed.

So, be sure to put everything away up off the floor. You can use cabinets, bookcases, or baskets to store things, and you can add hooks to your walls so you can hang things up like your purse or your kids’ backpacks.

Make sure everything has a place

Everything should have somewhere to go. If it doesn’t, then it’s just going to clutter up a surface. If everything has its place, then it’s easy to clean up because you can just pick it up and put it away. The best way to make cleaning your house easy on yourself is to have a place for every item.

If you find yourself with too many things that don’t have a place, it means you need to get rid of some stuff. You have too many things in general. Trust me when I say that the solution is not more storage that you can use to fill up with more stuff. Odds are, you don’t need baskets, you need a donation bag and a trash bag. Keeping clutter to a minimum is going to make a drastic difference when it comes to maintaining and cleaning your home.

Never leave a room empty handed

So, the natural consequence of everything having a place and just living is that things end up in the wrong rooms. Or, like laundry for example, they just need to be moved to where they belong after washing.

So, the key to avoiding too much clutter and keeping a clean house is to always make sure that you never leave a room empty handed. Look around as you exit and think about where you’re going next. Is there a glass that could be put in the dishwasher? Drop it off as you go by. Same with so many other things. Is there a load of laundry that could be dropped in a kid’s room? Is there something that needs to be brought up the stairs?

Take advantage of your movement to put things in their proper place.

Do a little of the cyclical tasks each day

The best example of this is laundry. I would recommend doing one load of laundry a day to keep up with it rather than waiting to do all the laundry at once. You’ll be more overwhelmed by six loads of laundry than you would be by one. Be sure to go through the whole thing too – wash it, dry it, and put it away each day. Otherwise, you’re still just letting things pile up.

However, this can go for most things. Each day, do something that has to be done each week. So, cleaning your bathroom on the same day or changing your sheets on the same day is a great way to keep up with things and make sure they get done without feeling like too much. Don’t wait until Saturday and say you’re going to get it all done in one day. That’s way too hard.  

Do something each day.

Keep cleaning supplies in each room

This is a tip I learned from K.C. Davis, who wrote an excellent book called How to Keep House While Drowning. If you keep a basket of necessary cleaning supplies in each big room, it’s easier to just do things immediately. If you constantly have to trek to a different part of the house to get cleaning supplies, it’s easier for something to fall by the wayside.

You want to make things as easy on yourself as possible and remove any barriers that simply don’t need to be there.

Do things in a way that makes sense for YOU

I gotta say, life got so much better when I stopped worrying about what society expected of my house and embraced what actually made sense for our family. As long as your house works, that’s all that matters. The trick is to pay attention to what you do naturally and build your house around that.

For example, I was always getting overwhelmed by putting my kids’ clothes away. I was so sick of hanging them up and folding them, which meant they would just sit in a basket by the laundry machine, taking up space and never getting put away. We would just dig through the basket each morning to find what they were going to wear, and everything was mixed up, so we’d waste precious time trying to find everything. It was annoying.

So, I ended up getting one of those hanging laundry baskets for sorting clothes. Each kid has their own basket, and then we have a fourth one for pajamas. This way, clothes come out of the dryer, and all I have to do is throw them into the appropriate basket. We’re still digging clothes out, but it’s way easier since they’re sorted, and this way, sorting actually gets done.

Now, this might seem silly to you, but it works for us. So, pay attention to how you’re doing things already and see if there’s a better, more streamlined way to do what you’re already doing. For example, if all of your clothes that you’re not ready to wash are piling up on a chair, get something specific to hold them, like a small bookcase that allows you to fold and sort.

Work with the flow of your household and habits, not against them.

If you’re struggling to clean your house, I hope these tips have been helpful, and you now have a clearer sense of what you need to do. Be kind to yourself as you learn how to properly manage things in a way that works. These are all habits that take time to build. You’ve got this!