How to clean your home

A letter to my past self

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This blog post is a letter to my past self. It’s what I wish I had known back in 2020 or 2021. Back when my domestic demands were growing - a family growing bigger, babies arriving, and the sudden ending of the “student”/20something phase and beginning of the “adulting”/middle aged person/householder phase.

tldr: Do it room by room.

Bad ways to clean the house

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When it was just me, or just me and my partner, our home was fine. A bit cluttered, but tolerable and homey. Once kids arrived, the wheels came off. It always felt like we were inches away from being featured on a reality TV show about hoarders. I was constantly overwhelmed. So here are the things I tried that did not work:

tldr: What works is doing it room by room.

1. Tidying up as I went around the house

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Nope. You end up never completing this loop. I found myself on my feet endlessly, just going from thing to thing to thing to thing. Exhausting and inefficient.

2. Hiring help

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Okay, this does help, of course. It’s a huge help. And it’s a privilege to be able to afford “buying time back” (I’m sure David Graeber would have thoughts). But the tidy house would last about 30 minutes, until the hoarding wave took over again. Also: having someone else tidy and clean for you means that you can never find your stuff.

3. Konmari-ing the heck outta this place (aka, decluttering)

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Does this mess spark joy? No. No, it does not. And, yes, decluttering can be cathartic and helpful and give you space to breathe. But! It takes time to do and, as more people become part of your home, decluttering can grind to a slow, democratic halt. (The number of stuffies I’ve tried to sneak out of this house…)

4. A place for every thing (and a thing for every place)

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Storage solutions! Yes, this helps. But the mess can still spread. For long periods it felt like we lived atop our clutter, and (empty) storage containers were buried underneath.

5. “How to keep house while drowning” (aka, this book)

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I remember reading this when I was really drowning, so overwhelmed by undone domestic to-dos. This book… did not really help. It gave some practical advice (e.g. categorize your mess into trash, laundry, etc.), but spent most of its length talking about the, uh, mouthfeel of cleaning: that is, the moralizing around it, the guilt we feel about it, how we can frame cleaning not as a neverending thankless loop but instead as a gift we give our future selves… And so on. Suffice it to say: I didn’t feel guilty, I felt annoyed and stressed by the mess. How do I do this mess?!

tldr: Room by room.

The best way to clean your home

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Dear 2021-Angela: the best way to clean your space is to do it room by room. Namely, this is the specific process:

1. Pick the room to clean. Call this Room r.
2. Organize your mess (the book was right about this one). Make piles for trash, laundry, things from room a, room b, etc. Put everything from room r back in its place in room r. Resist, at all costs, the urge to go perambulating away to the other rooms already! You must COMPLETE YOUR ROOM r PILES FIRST.
3. Once your piles are complete, complete the piles: throw trash away, put laundry in the laundry bin, return room a items to room a and so on. Important note: Resist the urge to begin cleaning room a. Instead, always simply dump the pile into room a and return to room r.
4. At some point, you will feel at peace with room r. You are now done. Sit back and BASK IN ROOM r‘S UNCLUTTERED GLORY.
5. Extra points: Wipe down the (NOW TIDY) surfaces of room r.
6. Extra extra points: Unearth that cable you were looking for 3 years ago.

That’s it! You now have, at the very least, one clean room in which you can enjoy serenity. Tomorrow, you can do the next room. Or, after a short tea break. Whatever. The point is, you are not in an endless “tidy as you go” loop. You have, instead, measurable milestones. Indeed, some may recognize this as the snowball method for debt payment, or some sort of Agile/lean startup process. For whatever reason - neurodiversity? the patriarchy? - this works well for me and, indeed, would have spared me an enormous amount of grief if I had just done it this way starting in 2021.