3 New Tools to Clean and Organise Your Home - Free House Cleaning Schedule

Who would have known that cleaning, decluttering and minimalism would become such popular ideas and activities in the last few years? Inspired by tidiness icons such as Marie Kondo, this positive clean trend is here to stay, which is why we’ve developed a few new pages that’ll help you level up your game in these areas. Read about how they can help you establish great cleaning and decluttering routines, and download your free copy of our printable Cleaning Schedule!

#Freebies #Inspiration #Organisation #Guides and Tips

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Who would have known that cleaning, decluttering and minimalism would become such popular ideas and activities in the last few years? We almost seem to enjoy these tedious tasks nowadays... We watch episode after episode of Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, read blogs about how to organise anything from our wardrobe to our fridge, we put our curated cleaning playlist on high, and get the whole family involved (with varying degrees of success perhaps, but read to the end to see our solution!).

This positive clean trend is here to stay, so we’ve developed a few new pages that’ll help you level up your game in these areas. We reckon that very few things beat that feeling of ticking off a thorough cleaning list, knowing that your home gets tidier by the minute, one area at a time.


Inspired by two cleaning and decluttering icons, Marie Kondo (@mariekondo) and Paulina Draganja (@forvaringsdrottningen), we’ve created a whole new category of pages to add to your planner or Mixbook™ - we call it Clean Space. Here you’ll find three brand new pages, including Organise Your Home, Declutter Your Home and Cleaning Schedule.

PRINTABLE FAMILY CLEANING SCHEDULE
PRINTABLE CLEANING SCHEDULE

“Don’t you think it is unnatural for us to possess things that don’t bring us joy or things that we don’t really need?” asks Marie Kondo in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising. The tidying up that she’s talking about here isn’t vacuuming the floors or cleaning the windows. It’s about tidying our life and possessions - and becoming happier people in the process.


We created the pages Declutter Your Home partly inspired by Marie Kondo’s drastic decluttering method, for someone who is ready for a GREAT change. If you’ve been accumulating clothes or items that you really don’t need, love or can keep track of, it’s time to take a step in the right direction with the help of these decluttering pages! Here, you get to set a realistic goal, reflect, declutter and, finally, measure your results. This method is guaranteed to help you achieve lasting change in your home, and a positive change in your mind too.

But where do you start?! The best is to start with one category of items at a time. If you start with one room or area of your home instead, you risk finding more items belonging to the same category, dispersed throughout the house. This will prevent you from getting a sense of how much you own in that particular category, which is key when deciding whether to keep or get rid of an item. The answer to this is to tackle one category at the time; it could be books or clothes or camping gear, for instance. Putting everything you own in a category into one big pile means you will only have to go through the same type of items once. You’ll also get a great overview of what you own this way.


To ensure we’re getting rid of the right things, Marie Kondo offers a surprisingly simple approach: Once you’ve piled all your clothes together for instance, pick up one garment at a time and ask yourself the following three questions:

- Does it make me happy?
- Does it serve a practical purpose?
- Is it of sentimental value to me?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, keep the item! But if you answered no to all of the above, you should consider getting rid of it. Next step is finding better ways of storing the items you choose to keep. Could you fold or hang your clothes in such a way that they don’t hide other items of clothing? If something is hidden, chances are it won’t get used much, even if you actually like the item! Having clear, simple systems for storage is what will help your home stay neat and tidy.


And speaking of neat and tidy, let’s delve into our next new page: Organise Your Home. This page is inspired by Swedish organisation guru, Paulina Draganja, and her book Organise your Home with One Project a Week.

A home can be a messy place - and that’s fine! But when the mess leads to unnecessary frustration and stress, it’s a good idea to get on top of it. But where do you start?! These pages are a great tool to help you start identifying and organising the problematic areas in your home. They’ll help you list and prioritise what needs to be done and follow up the results of your organisation efforts. Let the whole family join in the fun by distributing the tasks among everyone, and don’t forget to reward yourselves with something special after a job well done!

According to Paulina, there are three important factors to take into consideration when creating and maintaining a tidy home: right storage, right system and right routines.


Storage should be designed with the items that need to be storage in mind, how often they will be used and for what. In other words, it’s all about figuring out when and where in your home you will be using a specific item, and creating a storage solution that matches that. For instance, if you need to get to the items in a particular drawer once a week, it’s a good idea to make it easily accessible. If you only need to get to it once a year though, you can put it in a less prominent place in your home instead. The trick is then to try to store similar categories together so you know where to find those things, taking into account how often you’ll need them.


Having the right system is all about grouping similar categories together and working out a logical place to keep them, so that the whole family can get to them. If you use your curling iron every morning, the smartest place to store it would be in the bathroom cupboard. If you keep it in the bedroom instead, chances are you’ll just leave it lying around in the bathroom for days and days rather than putting it back in the bedroom again. Having the right system, that makes sense to the whole family, will simplify life for you and help you keep a tidy home for longer.


Having the right routine means establishing clear routines that help to keep your home tidy. Unless we learn to put things back in their place, no amount of organisation or clever storage will make a difference. Get the whole family on board, and help and encourage one another in this! Maintaining a tidy home is a shared responsibility and if everyone pulls their weight it doesn’t become a mammoth task for one or two family members only.

With the help of these three steps you’ll be well on your way to creating and maintaining a tidy home, we’re sure!


Our last, but by no means the least, new page is our Cleaning Schedule. This spread is designed to help you create good cleaning routines, as well as getting a clear overview of all tasks. Simply date your week at the top of the page, then tick off whatever tasks you complete during the week. As the weeks progress, you’ll start to realise just how much of a neat freak you really are!

We hope our new Clean Space pages will inspire you to create a great structure for tidiness at home. You will be thanking yourself forever once you get started and feel your motivation growing, as you tick things off your list!


To get the most out of these pages, try using them together with our To Do stickers. These mini stickers with cute icons, flags and banners will help you stay on top of all your tasks and jobs around the house, all while looking lovely in your planner or Mixbook™!


To get you off to a great start, we have 2 printables for you this week:

Family Cleaning Schedule - Print it out and get the whole family involved in a fun way! Give everyone a task (or more!) and place a cute sticker in the corresponding place once the job is done.

Cleaning Schedule - This works roughly the same way. Place a sticker in every completed task and get a clear overview of what’s been done and what still needs doing. You’ll get hooked; we promise!

PRINTABLE FAMILY CLEANING SCHEDULE
PRINTABLE CLEANING SCHEDULE

Good luck with all your cleaning, decluttering and organising! And remember - you’ll feel so great when you’re done!