The Simple Home Reset: Getting Back to Baseline Clean

All right, I came down this morning. I just felt anxious because my house was a mess. So we're gonna do a home reset. I just sent the big two kids off to school. The baby is currently napping and me and the one-year-old are gonna start getting this house back to, you know, ground zero. Baseline clean is what I like to call it. But first, let's get some coffee. If you're like, why is there a blanket on this woman's coffee machine? It's because I put a blanket over it when I make coffee first thing in the morning so it doesn't wake up the rest of my house. And if you're like, why is this on the coffee machine? The one-year-old did that. Yay! Okay, so when I have a space that just feels really overwhelming, I start by doing what I call a visual clutter sweep. So I'm just gonna try to tone out all of the other mess and I'm just gonna focus on visual clutter and getting things back to where they go. So we end up with a lot of piles kind of going in the directions of where they need to go and I slowly make my way back. The reason I start with visual clutter is one, you hear it clean when you got all the clutter out and two, if I don't get to anything else, clearing visual clutter gives you the biggest bang for your buck. You know, if the baby doesn't end up taking good naps or he gets fussy and he wants to play, if I at least do visual clutter, I'm gonna feel like 80% better for not as much effort. So let's put some of these away. One of the most important things you need to worry about when you're doing visual clutter is that you're taking time to address the piles that you've probably been ignoring all weekend long or all week long. The point is to get as much visual clutter out of the way. So if there's a pile you've been neglecting or some item that's been sitting there because you need to take it down to the basement, now's the time to do it. Addressing all of the piles of visual clutter. You might be creating piles in the process of getting to the visual clutter, but then you are addressing the piles too. You want run, run? I have Lexa. Can you play run, baby, run? Okay, the baby is waking up from her nap, so we're taking a minor break to feed her, and then we'll try to get some stuff done while she's hanging out too. We'll see what we can do. I get asked a lot about how to keep up with chores and just things that you wanna get done when you have little kids running around at home. I'm trying to think of a tagline for how I approach this now, but it's almost the way I think about it is I'm like, just do it anyways. When I had one kid, I feel like I always waited until nap, even when I had two kids. I would wait until they were asleep, until nap time, until they were busy with something else to get things done around the house that I wanted to do, and then once I had three, there was never nap times lining up. I couldn't do it, so I just started doing stuff when they were around, doing it anyways, doing it hard, knowing that they're probably gonna slow me down, that it might be a little bit messier or crazier or whatever, but just getting it done anyways. In the past, I would've maybe waited until Tate was down for a nap to get tidying done around the house. Hi, but now I don't wanna do that. I wanna use his nap to get stuff done that I wanna do, and so I just wait for it while they're around. This is your toothbrush. Do you wanna brush your teeth? Do you want it on? Yeah, on. It goes a lot slower. It's not quite as pretty and perfect, but I get as much done as I can while they're around. I think you just have to accept that you might move slower, you might have to take breaks, so here we go. Let's clean up this lawyer. With kids, there's just always stuff underneath things. One of my favorite things about doing Monday resets is that the two big kids are at school, and so I can just kinda casually get rid of stuff that they've been weirdly hoarding onto, and I actually shared about this when it was the summer that I was excited for the kids to go back to school so that I could get rid of some stuff, and most people agreed with me, but some people got upset. They're like, these are your kids' treasures. How can you get rid of them? First of all, my kids have eight treasures a day, okay? You times that by 365 days, it's a lot of treasures, and I'm not saying I'm getting rid of every single thing. I'm just saying I'm getting rid of something they said was special that they haven't actually played with. Are we gonna read this? Yes, sit here, that they actually haven't played with. It's just sitting around, not actually getting used. My house has plenty of stuff that's my kids' stuff. I'm not like some minimalist, sterile house where they don't have anything. Just doesn't all belong in our main living space. Okay, with any luck, I'll drive a truck. A tube and I could reach the sea. Go get another book. Anyways, I think the point is when you have kids, you end up with a lot of stuff, and it can be hard to kind of differentiate what's important to keep and what you don't have to, and if you don't kind of weed some of it out, you're just gonna end up keeping everything. So I have buckets. I have things that stay in the basement that I can sort of sort through later that I'm not really sure, because if it were up to kids, our houses would all look like every episode we've ever seen of Hoarders, right? And as the kids get older, you can start to involve them in this. In his bedroom, my oldest has a basket. I don't know that I have the answer. I'm constantly trying to find the balance between not letting there be so much that it totally overwhelms me. I'm all about prime real estate, and to me, the main living areas. I don't need knickknacks sort of crowding this stuff up. This is the prime real estate. This needs to be the stuff that we're using actively every day. I don't know why that button's not working. Something else I always kind of notice, and especially as I continue to have more children and our family dynamic is constantly changing, is that you have to constantly evaluate the systems that you have set up in your house, because they're gonna change as your seasons of life change. You know, I think sometimes we get stuck in certain systems that we've used, or even certain toys that we've kept out, and we have to constantly sort of reevaluate it, and be like, has my kid outgrown this? Are we even using it? I heard somebody talk about the 90-90 rule the other day, which I never heard, but it basically was like, if you're trying to decide if you're gonna keep something, is to say, has it been used in the last 90 days, or will it get used in the next 90 days? I feel like that's a helpful way to think about kid stuff specifically. You're gonna have such clean teeth today, Tate. Okay, I kind of got through what I could while the kids were awake, and now they're both taking a nap at the same time, which is nice. I do have another coffee. Don't judge me. I only had a few sips of the other one before my one-year-old sabotaged it, so. Since I've got most of the main living space picked up, I'm letting the robot vacuum over there. We're gonna tackle the toy room. Now, as I've been doing my flat surfaces, anything that's a toy-related thing has just been piling here, okay? I get that this is gonna look a little bit scary, but I actually have a really good system set up in this playroom to make putting it away really quick, and I know that I'm gonna be able to do this in probably maybe eight minutes, maybe 10. So the key here is in this playroom, everything has a home, and even more important than that, everything is labeled, so I know exactly where everything has to go back. I don't have to try to remember what bins were what for what, what cubbies were for what, and the repetition makes it so that even my kids, I know it doesn't look like right now, like my children clean, they do. I promise I make them clean. You don't need to leave me nasty comments about how I need to teach my children to clean. They clean at a level that is developmentally appropriate for them. A lot of this is my mess of bringing stuff back to where it needs to be after a long weekend of having family memories, okay? So... Okay, so just like when I was cleaning in the main living space, when I came across something that belonged in the playroom, I just kind of made a pile and I made it go towards the playroom. Now that I'm in the playroom, anything that doesn't belong in the playroom is gonna just get piled up by the door. We're just sort of sliding things towards where they need to go so that we don't get distracted going eight million different places. I like to use little baskets or bins that I carry around, so this is my not playroom basket. This is definitely not some sort of Pinterest perfect playroom, but it works for us, and I can tidy in under 10 minutes, and my kids can generally tidy it pretty well too because it's pretty obvious where everything goes. Again, not perfect, but I was able to do that in a couple of minutes. I am seeing one issue here that my trains have now overflowed out of the bin that they belong in, so this is an organizing issue that I'm gonna need to fix. Organizing your systems, it's all about constantly reevaluating and seeing what's working and what's not working. My kids are really into trains right now, and we have added to our collection, and so now it's probably time to pick maybe something else here they're not playing with quite as much to make more room for the trains. So now that I have cleared all of the flat surfaces, I can sort of just move on to basic cleaning that I wanna do. I have my robot vacuum doing the floors. I can just wipe down some counters, and this part is gonna be 8,000 times easier because I took the time to just focus on stuff first. Now all the surfaces are clear, so again, even if I don't really do anything else, it feels a heck of a lot better. It's like that cherry on top of the cake. You know, I'm gonna light a candle. Just appreciate the hard work that I put in. It's pretty convenient timing because the baby is waking up. So I think I'm gonna leave it at this. I feel 8,000 times better than I did when I woke up. I got kind of everything back to a baseline clean. It's not spotless, but it's not giving me anxiety anymore. So thanks for hanging out with me and cleaning. I hope that you were able to gain maybe some little insights or wisdom into some of the way that I kind of get my house back to a baseline when I'm feeling totally overwhelmed by it. Kind of just break it into little pieces and work my way through it slowly, even with kids running around. But as always, thank you so much for stopping by watching. I hope you're having a fantastic day. Remember to be kind to yourself and others, and I will see you all in my next video.