20 Minute End of Day Tidy Up

Raise your hand if your home is now in a continuous state of mess and you have reached a point where

a) it is too much to handle

b) no one is coming around for the foreseeable future so what is the point of tidying and cleaning?

c) the kids will mess it up in 0.3 seconds so again what’s the point?!

It is hard, our home has never been used to every inch of its being as it is at the moment, so I have made a rule that I will not tidy up until 20 minutes before the kids go to bed and we are all involved in it. This means that once the kids are asleep my husband and I get to enjoy some adult time in a tidy home. So here’s how our 20 minute tidy system works.

1. Kids are responsible to pick up all their toys and put them in their room/place before bed. Toys are scattered around the play room/living room all day. We have agreed that’s fine (more of a nonverbal agreement instilled by the fact no-one was listening to my repeated calls to ‘PICK UP YOUR TOYS’) I have made peace to see lego parts lying around the house all day, but come 7:30pm they will no longer exist. They have stuck to tidying up before bed due to my tactics used in this blog post.  
2. My husband is responsible to surface clean- he walks around the house with a bottle of Xtra Protect and a microfibre cloth. He takes each room and wipes surfaces, counters tops, door handles. Doing that ensures any misplaced items get put back in their place and the commonly touched areas are cleaned daily.
3. I do bathrooms – again just a quick tidy and clean of toilet.
4. Then whoever is not doing bedtime, does floors. We have hardwood floors throughout the house so a whiz around does the trick.

By 8pm kids are asleep, and I enjoy a tidy and quiet home for a whole 60 minutes before I crash and it all starts again.

kanikasrivastava

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