3 Ways To Keep Your Home Organized As A Single Mom
Have you ever walked into your house and immediately felt drained? Is your home full of clutter and it overwhelms you to think where to start tackling it?
Being a mom is hard enough, the demands, the expectations, and the tiredness can be debilitating at times. But there is one big difference that makes single moms’ work that much more difficult, the lack of helping hands around the house, the lack of a partner to share the load with, and the lack of a significant other to offer love and friendship at the end of a long day. This simple fact can make the rest and recovery times even harder to achieve for single moms; therefore, keeping your home clean and organized daily can make your life easier and less chaotic, both physically and mentally.
These are 3 ways to keep your home organized as you’re figuring out life with your kiddos:
- Declutter often
- Shelves and baskets
- Set up a routine for you and your kids
Declutter often and let the fresh air come in, this is literally how I feel when I do it. Before I became a single mom, I used to keep all my kids’ stuff for sentimental reasons or to save them for when they were older, etc. Once I started this solo parenting life and realized the cleaning was on me and my kids 100% of the time, I noticed the mess was too much to handle by myself. The clutter suddenly became overpowering, and I could not clean fast enough or long enough to keep things organized.
Don’t fall into this trap, take a photo of the sentimental valuables and stick it in a scrapbook. You can create beautiful memory books and let go of the stuff while keeping your memories for your children and grandchildren intact.
Take a trash bag with you and do a walk around your home, especially the kid’s rooms, every week or two. You can most definitely include the kids in this activity, although it may create a more emotional result for you and them. Yet, once they get used to this routine, decluttering will become easier and easier and all of you will become unattached to stuff. Once you’ve achieved this point in your decluttering journey, decluttering feels easy and like a breath of fresh air instead of a dreadful chore.
Shelves and baskets will save your mental health. Clutter doesn’t always have to be trashed toys or things we don’t use anymore. Clutter can also be things we use every day, things we need around the house. If you declutter often and you still experience the overwhelming feeling of living in a cluttered home when you walk into your house, you may be dealing with a lack of shelves and baskets to hide your stuff.
Investing some of your money in shelves and baskets can fix this issue, shelves (or any variation of them) will help you keep the floor free from things, and everything will have a place to live in your house, a place away from the floor.
The baskets are what will hide your stuff on the shelves and make it all look cute and welcoming. Each basket (or any variation of the container you decide to go with) can have a label and become a house for a theme of things. For example: cables, hair stuff, socks, toys, etc.
This shelves and baskets approach can get pricey very fast, don’t get discouraged. There are ways to save money while you organize your home. Thrift stores are a great way to keep within your budget while shopping for baskets or finding shelves to take home. Just make sure that the furniture you decide to take home fits your space, it’s complete, and it fits the baskets and containers you have.
Set up a routine, the sooner the better. As you already know, clutter will always make its way into your home. Gifts for the kids, unnecessary purchases, things get broken, outgrown, etc. so setting up a decluttering routine often can help you stay on top of it instead of it taking over your home. I like to do mine every 2 weeks, but you can work around your schedule however it works best for you. Just try to keep it as often as possible. The closer together the less work it’ll be for you.
The routine doesn’t just apply to decluttering; it also applies to everything else involving the organization of your home. The closer together your scheduled times are the better. The less backed-up work you’ll have waiting for you.
So yeah, decluttering often, using shelves and baskets, and having a scheduled time for your decluttering and other organizing tasks in your home will make life easier for you as a busy single mom. I completely understand that your tired body probably won’t want to clean up or organize after a long day, but if you try to change the perspective and oversee the work as a way to do self-care and schedule it during times when you know you will be at home for a little while. Also, the sooner together you do this the less time and effort it’ll take. Eventually, as you grow your sources of income, you’ll be able to hire someone to help you with the daily tasks that we single moms take such a strong hit with. Don’t give up.
Try this out next week, take a moment, and plan your week with some scheduled decluttering breaks in between, and share with us how it felt on my social media (link Facebook) I would love to hear from you. And if it is working share this article with a friend to spread the word.
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