How to Have a Clean Home With Kids

Let’s face it, having a clean home can sometimes feel unattainable, especially as life brings new challenges. While it may be easier when you’re single, a student, or working outside the home, new circumstances demand adaptation. The real challenge arises when time, energy, motivation, or routines are lacking—so how do you maintain a tidy space then?

How to Have a Clean Home With Kids: Deal With the Source Problems First, and The Rest Will Fall Into Place

A messy home often reflects a lack of time, energy, motivation, discipline, or know-how. To solve it, address these core causes.

Not Having the Energy or Having Physical Problems

The older you get, the less energy you have to do things. That is true especially if you have health problems or don’t exercise regularly. I say this with a grain of salt, as two out of my four pregnancies were very close to each other, the second one during Covid and a huge baby, and recovery afterwards was nothing short of a challenge. Some of my muscles required for daily life had literally atrophied, and I had very bad lower back pain. It was almost to the point of having to take a painkiller daily just to get out of bed. I eventually complained to a friend of mine, who’s had two difficult pregnancies and reconstructive surgery, and she recommended I do the Core program from LesMills. I sweated through pain and shaking, but eventually, after a month of pure torture, I began to see the results. The truth is, after 40, muscles become weaker, and it’s so easy to start losing whatever muscles you previously had. It’s critical to exercise at least twice a week if you want to live pain-free, ultimately enjoy an enjoyable life, and keep a clean house. Having done Core exercises three times a week for the past year, I’ve been amazed to discover how much more energy I have now compared to when I was in my 30s and even 20s.

Being Depressed and not Wanting to Do Anything

Most of us have experienced depression at some point in our lives. Life is life; it’s filled with good periods and sometimes not-so-good ones. Challenges can arise, throwing us into the deep end. Sometimes we’re having to deal with too many issues at the same time and get overwhelmed and depressed about it. So, if you’re starting to feel depressed, take care of it – take some vitamin D, get exercise, maybe some supplements, eat better food, watch some movies on YouTube about how people live in the impoverished regions in Africa – without proper roads and struggling for daily food, and be reminded that it’s not as bad as you thought it was.

Not Having the Motivation

That is totally understandable. Who wants to clean and tidy up if you can watch movies instead, spend time with loved ones, play board games, or simply do something else? I’ve recently discovered a cool YouTube channel called Clutterbug, and listen to this video “Extreme Decluttering Motivation for 2025” when I feel I need a bit of a kick in the butt. It’s basically a 45-minute motivational speech on how you deserve to live in a clean, organized space, throw out everything you don’t need, and reclaim your space. It’s a great listen if you’re having a hard time decluttering and getting rid of things you don’t really need.

Having Too Much Clutter

Cleaning can be easy when there is no clutter. However, if you have things lying on the floor, you can’t just start cleaning; you have to deal with the clutter first. Items on a desk that need to be put away, children’s toys that need to be put back, unsorted mail, cups in the wrong places, cabinets bursting with stuff, you get the picture. It may be that you don’t have enough storage space – shelves or cabinets- to store your belongings. But don’t let that hold you back – too many people give “I don’t have a place to put it” as an excuse.

Not Having Designated Places for Things

If you are having trouble putting things away, it may be time to reduce the number of items you own and designate a place for each. “A place for everything and everything in its place” is a famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin. However, as a general rule, you want your storage to go vertical in a room – think shelving, vertical storage. If you need to store small items, store them so you don’t have to dig through everything in your drawer to see what’s in it.

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Not having a Good Routine

When I was first trying to figure out how to run a tidy, clean home with 4 small children living in it, it occurred to me that I was doing some things too often and others not often enough. So I took a pen and paper and walked around the house, making notes of everything that needed cleaning, how often it was currently cleaned, and whether it looked clean. If it wasn’t clean enough, I noted that it needed to be done more frequently. If it looked too clean, I noted that it might not need to be done that often.

The Cleaning Schedule

Here comes the Cleaning Schedule. Prior to having a clean and organized home (post having children), I didn’t really have a cleaning schedule. Apart from laundry, dishes, floors, and general tidying up,things would get done when they started to look dirty. However, the problem with this approach is that, sometimes there would be too many things that would get dirty all at once, and then I’d feel overwhelmed by them, I would start doing one or two of them, but then the other things that really need doing (like laundry, food, floors) would come in, and something wouldn’t get done. This caused stress, overwhelm, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction. This is when I took the paper and pen and figured out the cleaning schedule that works for us.

A cleaning schedule would be different for every person and every family. You really need to figure out what works best for you. If you work outside your home, your home wouldn’t need to be cleaned half as often as a family with children who are home-based. If you run a homestead or live in a farmhouse, you may need to clean the floors way more often than if you live in the city. It also depends on your tolerance for mess and dirt. When I was living in the Middle East, it was very obvious that Muslim people had more tolerance towards dirt than other people, and if they could afford it, they would have a full-time cleaner or maid in their home. If you have homeschooled children, your house may get very dirty very often, and you may have to vacuum the floors daily. If you work in an office, making sure you have appropriate work attire may be your top priority.

How to Come Up with a Cleaning Schedule That Works for You

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• Go around your house and note down everything that gets cleaned.
• In the second column, write down how often it gets done.
• In the third column, write down how satisfied you are with the result.
• In the third column, write down the new frequency of cleaning.

Here is the file I promised. You are welcome to download it and fill it in as your cleaning routing worksheet.

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Put That Information in a Typical Monthly Calendar

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I don’t like using a weekly calendar for this, because not everything requires weekly cleaning, and if you only have a weekly cleaning routine, you’ll be tempted to skip it because it doesn’t really need to be done. Actually, every time I’d try to use a weekly cleaning schedule, it just didn’t work for me at all. And let’s face it, if you are running a large family or a homestead, you’ll have plenty more responsibilities to do, and it’s impossible to get everything done 100% if you try to do it too often. So, I recommend you have a typical month cleaning schedule. This will ensure that you hit all the marks, even if you don’t hit them as often as you may ideally like, and it’ll also remove the temptation to skip them altogether. For example, in our household, each child’s bed sheets are washed once a month (along with the towels) in alternating weeks. This way, the towels get washed once a week, and only one set of sheets goes into the laundry at a time. This makes my life easier when putting them away, because I don’t like trying to figure out which bedspread belongs to whom, and I also don’t have to do all the beds in the same day, which can get overwhelming. Would I prefer to have it done once a week or every two weeks? Sure, but with everything else we have going on, this is what works best for this stage of life. In other words, the goal is to get the cleaning calendar to work for you.

However, I do understand if you prefer the straightforward weekly cleaning routine with a monthly and daily checklist. I think this may work well for many people, so I’ve included it here as well.

And here is a blank one, so you are free to print it and fill it with your own cleaning schedule. I will soon have a pdf-fillable form, and when it’s done I will include it here as well.

Sticking to a Cleaning Calendar

I had good success in the past, just having one filled up and on the fridge. I’d refer to it daily, and so long as it got done, it worked reasonably well. However, the issue is that the paper on the fridge would eventually get water drops on it, start to crumble, and look unsightly halfway through the year. I resolved this issue by putting a transparent sheet protector over it and strong fridge magnets. However, as life got busier, I found that I needed more structure to make things work. Also, I now had three calendars on my fridge, which seemed one or two too many – a monthly calendar, a cleaning calendar, and a homeschooling schedule.

The Ultimate Homeschool Mom Planner

Here’s why I developed the ultimate Homeschool Mom Planner. I’ll add a link once I have the final version, in case you would like to purchase it yourself. It literally has everything. Let’s face it, there are people who are born with amazing organisational and tidying-up skills. Great for them, I’m sure they have easier lives. The rest of us have to struggle, by trial and error, to eventually develop something remotely resembling a functional schedule, and when we finally get it to work, we want to hang on to it like a bug on a straw in the middle of a puddle.

Maybe you have (undiagnosed ADHD), maybe you’re a slob, or maybe you’re an overwhelmed mom, or a large family mom. Maybe you are an artist with your head in the clouds, and figuring out schedules and routines is not in your DNA. Whatever the reason is, I’m sure you’ll find this helpful.

I literally took all of my life tracking papers – the daily to-do list, the monthly planners, the cleaning schedule, the spring cleaning schedule, the yard schedule, the paper with the scribbled birthdays, the dates of those who passed away, the annual chores, the house tasks, the homeschooling planner, the homeschooling tracker, the kids’ clothes tracker paper, the kids’ shoe size paper, the child size sizing paper, then got some tips from the best planners I could find, and then, finally, I put it all in One Planner. The Mom Planner. The Ultimate Homeschool Mom Planner.