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Wednesday, January 26, 2011

A new approach to keeping my house clean- All you need is 15 minutes!

I’ll admit that I’m never one to keep a really clean house.  It’s always tidy-ish, but never clean and I find my self franticly cleaning every time guests are coming over.  Life doesn’t have to be that way.

I also don’t want to miss out on spending time with my cutie 5 month old son, Jake.

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More food mom!! Your squash is Yum-o!

Ah, Jake :)

Anyway, this cleaning thing!  So I’ve adopted a new practice and have been going strong for about 3 weeks now and it seems to really be working! 

It’s all about 15 minutes.  My friend Sara commented the other day that if you’re just dreading cleaning your house, break it into 15 minutes.  Clean for 15, then do something fun for 15.  Set a timer and go!

My strategy is all based on nap time.  Jake usually takes about 2 or 3 good naps a day.  So for the first 15 minutes of each nap I clean.  I pick one room or cluster of rooms per day and focus just there.  Rather than dreading dusting the whole house or vacuuming every single room, one or two rooms a day doesn’t seem all that bad! 

The best part is that once you start, it gets easier because you just cleaned that room a week ago.  In theory you can’t have created that much of a mess in a week, so it’s not the deep cleaning you have to do when you only get to it once a  … month?  If I finish before my 15 minutes is up, then it’s just more time I can do something fun. So today in my first 15 minutes I picked up all the baby and dog toys strewn across the living room, picked up all my random knitting projects, dusted the living room and even had enough time to sit down and write this blog post.  The only thing left to do is vacuum, which can easily be done during nap #2 and, voila!  My living room is clean! 

Easy enough since Jake isn’t destroying my house on a daily basis, but you work with what you’ve got right?  Start small, it really works!

Until the next time …
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

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2 comments:

Heather Leavers said...

Do you know about http://www.flylady.net/ ? Her system works to the same principle. It's a bit too religious for me, but I did learn a lot about cleaning in small doses!

Corie Drane said...

I think this technique is pretty easy. 15 minutes? Love it! Building maintenance in our house is almost impossible because of my newborn baby and my husband is busy at work so he does the chores when he gets home and during weekends. But I really want to keep our house clean all the time. Havin' a baby is quite different from the time when we were just renting in NYC and no baby. Thanks for this tip!

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