Over the past year, I have been making sincere efforts to improve how I handle the mundane and sometimes overwhelming tasks of running a household. With four small children and a husband who can work long hours at times, I knew that I had to stop letting chores pile up and learn how to handle everything better. My children needed me to set a good example, and they also needed to be able to find clean clothes in the morning. Ha!
Since becoming more diligent about a few aspects of home management, I can say with certainty that our family is much happier. I know I am much more relaxed and able to keep my head above water, and as we all know, if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
I have compiled a list of the most impactful changes I have made to improve our home life. My hope is that if you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and behind in everything (like I was), you might find this list useful.
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Roomba
You guys, I am not kidding when I say that this little robot vacuum changed my ever-loving life. I was pregnant with Leo when I impulsively ordered it online. I was nesting like a mad woman, and my house could not get clean enough. Everywhere I looked, I saw crumbs, hair, and tiny toys on my floor. I would sweep with a broom, but it wouldn’t get everything. I would run our regular vacuum, and the floor would be dirty again within an hour. I used both wet and dry microfiber mops on our tile and wood laminate floors, and I was never impressed.
On a pregnancy-induced whim, I ordered the Roomba 960. I knew it was a splurge, but I had some gift cards to offset the cost. There are robot vacuums in several brands and across all price points. I chose this one because it connected to an app on my phone which would allow me to schedule routine cleanings and start the vacuum remotely, even when I wasn’t home.
I am telling you, I would marry my Roomba (if it were legal and not weird). We have owned it for almost a year and a half, and I have no complaints. It has always worked extremely well. No issues at all. I buy the filters on Amazon (an off-brand), and there is very little maintenance involved.
What I have loved about it the most is that we keep our floors picked up because I run the Roomba twice a day. My kids know that Roomba will eat their tiny toys, so they are better about picking up after themselves. Roomba eats up all the crumbs, hairs, small scraps of paper, random Cheerios…everything. Occasionally, Roomba will eat some small Legos or Barbie shoes or ponytail holders, but I absolutely love that I can easily open the bin and get those items out. Those types of items don’t destroy the Roomba like they might a standard vacuum.
I feel like if your floors are clean, your whole house just feels clean. It is a great way to maintain a baseline level of cleanliness without having to actually do anything. While the Roomba is running, you can be working on another chore, reading to your children, or not even be in the house. I love multi-tasking.
We use the virtual wall barriers (Roomba comes with one and we purchased an extra) to keep Roomba from going down the stairs at our new house or into rooms we don’t need it to clean. Roomba goes from our hardwood floors, over rugs, and onto carpet with no issue. After the first couple of runs, it learns your house floor plan and runs in an organized pattern so that it doesn’t miss any spots. If the battery gets low, it goes back to the docking station, charges, and then returns to where it left off to finish the cleaning job.
There’s nothing I don’t love about this little robot. In fact, I love it so much that we have a second one (slightly different model) for our downstairs, and we have a robot mop!
Sam’s Club
Yes, I know, everyone loves Costco, but don’t sleep on Sam’s Club! The closest Costco and Sam’s Club is an hour away from us, and I have never actually been inside either store. However, I purchased a Sam’s Club membership online for $45 for the year (Costco’s start at $60). I use that membership to purchase items that we go through quickly in our house such as diapers, wipes, dishwasher and laundry soap, trash bags, paper plates, and batteries. These items are then delivered to my house, much of the time with free or very inexpensive shipping.
It used to be that we would run out of one of those items every single week. The local box stores didn’t sell quantities large enough to keep us from having to restock so frequently. It became 1) annoying to constantly have to buy necessities each week and 2) an easy excuse to go shopping – which meant that “Going to buy trash bags” quickly turned into “Going to buy trash bags and a new coffee mug and a cute outfit for each child and a pair of shoes marked 30% off and some new under eye concealer and also a rug for our living room.”
We needed to eliminate the need to go to the store so much, so that’s where Sam’s Club comes into the picture. I love that I can buy our favorite household items in large quantities for great prices. We never run out of laundry detergent or batteries now, and I believe we are saving money — not only on the cost of the items themselves but also on all the “extras” we aren’t purchasing by not shopping as often.
Click-List
Our town was a little late to the grocery delivery/order-ahead game, but we finally have a couple of options if going to the grocery store is a giant pain in your butt. There are many reasons why I despise the task, and I am sure I don’t need to list them because I feel like grocery shopping is a universal “ugh” chore. I am sure there are some people who really enjoy it, but if they exist, I haven’t met any of them yet.
One of our major supermarkets provides grocery delivery to your door via Shipt, a 3rd party service. Unfortunately, Shipt does not deliver to my house, so I rely on Click-List. Click-List is a service that one of our other grocery stores provides. You can order your items online or via the app, and then you select a time to come and pick up the items at the store. The bags are carried out and placed in your vehicle for you. You don’t have to get out of the car!
I love this option because it is inexpensive — only $4.95 each time you use it (the first 3 orders are free), extremely convenient, and a great excuse to throw your kids in the car for an afternoon drive when they are beating down the gates of Crazy Town. I like to play a podcast (the sound of adults talking in a podcast instantly calms my children down), grab a coffee from Starbucks, and enjoy the outing — ending it with picking up my groceries without leaving my vehicle.
You can leave notes regarding produce, instructing the shoppers about what you prefer in your fruit or vegetables (green bananas, please!). You can also select “no substitutions,” which means that if an item is out of stock, the shoppers will not replace it with a “similar” item. I now choose this option after the shoppers made some substitutions I didn’t care for. It’s not their fault… they do their best. I just would rather not receive an item than risk a substitution I don’t love. Out of stock items don’t happen frequently, but when something is not available, I can usually grab it at Target (or elsewhere, but who am I kidding?). You are not charged for out of stock items.
The Click-List shoppers are always super careful when loading my purchases into my vehicle. They always give me the eggs and bread to keep up in the front with me. I have never had any issues with not getting items that I paid for. I can’t say enough good things about this service!
We have been using Click-List for a couple months now, and, as a result, we have been so much better about using nearly all of our groceries before they expire. We are buying only what we actually want to consume instead of making impulse buys at the store. When I would make grocery runs in person, I tried to stock up for a couple of weeks so that I wouldn’t have to return so quickly, but I found that we weren’t using the food quick enough — which meant lots of waste and rotten produce. That issue is almost non-existent now.
When I am meal planning, I will add items to my shopping cart while I am browsing the recipes so that I know I have everything I need. It makes life so much easier when I know that our meals are planned and our groceries have been purchased for the week, yet all I had to do was add items to a shopping cart and show up to the store at the right time.
I know not every city has this type of service, but if you do, please give it a try!
A Load of Laundry A Day…
…keeps the Laundry Mountain At Bay. Laundry has always been one of my most hated household responsibilities. With four children and a husband (who wears 3 outfits in a day), I was drowning in laundry up until a few weeks ago. It was nothing to find me buried under piles of clean laundry that needed folded and put away. Our children would just dig their clothes out of the Laundry Mountain in my bedroom. I reasoned that there were more pressing tasks to accomplish and the laundry could wait. Washing it wasn’t the problem, but getting it turned around and put in its place was the challenge.
At the beginning of this school year, I decided that I was not going to let the laundry get backed up again. I didn’t want to spend hours of my day folding laundry, so I knew I needed to make some changes.
I took a page from Allie Casazza’s playbook and vowed to do one load of laundry every single day. That means one load each day would be washed, dried, folded, and put away. This would mean that the amount of clothes to fold and put away would likely be pretty small and would only require a few minutes of my day.
I knew that in order for this to become a habit, I needed to work into some “anchors” in my day. Let’s be honest, most of our day revolves around our meals. So, I have been very diligent about working my laundry routine around our meal schedule. At breakfast, I go around to all the bedrooms and gather the dirty clothes from the previous day. It usually is only a few articles of clothing per person. I put the dirty clothes in the washer and get the load started.
At lunch, I move the wet, clean clothes from the washer to the dryer.
While I am prepping dinner, I get all the dried clothes into a laundry basket and take it to my bedroom to be folded. Typically, while dinner is cooking and my kids are playing, I will fold the clothes and sort them into piles on my floor. Each child gets their own row of clothes. For example, Noelle’s clothes are sorted into her tops, bottoms, and PJs in a line on my floor. This allows her to easily pick up her piles of clothes and place them in the right drawers. She is 8, so she is more than capable of knowing what goes where, but I do this system for my 5 and 3 year old as well, which allows them both to put their clothes away in the correct drawers.
I continue to sort the rest of the clothes into individual piles. Luke’s t-shirts. Luke’s gym shorts. My yoga pants. My t-shirts. Let’s be honest, that’s the extent of the clothes I wear. Clothes that need hung up are taken care of right away.
I make it a goal that the kids put their clothes away before bedtime, and then Luke and I finish up putting away our clothes before relaxing for the night.
Even though the task takes an entire day to complete, it is all done in small 5-10 minute chunks of time. By working the routine around our meal schedule, it has become habitual. I love going to bed knowing that the laundry is caught up, but I also love that I didn’t have to waste 4-5 hours of my day to get me there.
If laundry is plaguing you, consider trying the “one load a day” method. You may never have to scale a Laundry Mountain again!
Make the Bed
My last change is probably the smallest one, yet it has made such a big difference. I make our bed first thing in the morning. I used to not make my bed, ever. I didn’t understand the point. You were just going to get back into it anyway, right? However, seeing a tidy bed just creates such an inviting, calming space in your bedroom. The day can be stressful. Who wants to relax in a chaotic, messy room? I have found that my spending 30 seconds making my bed each day, the rest of my room stays much cleaner and I feel a sense of peace when I step into my space — whereas before, the master bedroom door was closed at all times during the day for fear of anyone seeing what chaos was behind the door. I, myself, didn’t even want to see it.
Please do not think that I am implying that I “have it all together.” I positively, certainly, do not. There are mornings when I think that the next knock on the door will be 1) the police, investigating suspicious screaming or 2) the circus on a recruiting trip — but I WILL say that the above steps have made life a lot easier and me an (almost) stress-less mama (almost).
