Tips For Keeping A Clean House If You Have A Large Family
A busy schedule, exhaustion, and an overall disdain for scrubbing and mopping make it tough to muster up the will to do chores. A large family adds even more cleaning to the task list, with more people making more mess. However, a larger household also means you have more people to help, so why not streamline the process?
Delegate age-appropriate chores to family members and use kid-safe cleaning products. Set a cleaning schedule and stick to it, rotating larger tasks. Keep up with routine deep cleans, so the mess doesn’t become overwhelming, and clean as you go. Use smart storage solutions and regularly declutter, making it a habit to tidy up each evening before bed.
If you have a large family, cleaning the house doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it seems. Instead of dreading the process, use these tips to make tidying up with a large family more manageable.
1. Set Up A Cleaning Schedule
Create a schedule for tidying up and review it with your family members. Post it where everyone can see it.
Keep it realistic and stick to it. For example, Monday is laundry day, on Tuesday you clean the bathrooms, Wednesdays are for dusting, and so on.
You don’t have to clean every single thing every time you clean the house. On the contrary, there are other tasks you want to do every day. Having a schedule keeps things from falling through the cracks without making cleaning sessions overwhelming.
2. Clean As You Go
Keep messes from becoming more difficult and overwhelming by cleaning as you go. If you’re cooking dinner, wash the dishes while the roast is in the oven. Wipe spills up as soon as they occur so they don’t become caked-on and stubborn.
After you use the microwave, it’s the perfect time to clean it because food softens and wipes off the surface easily. Cleaning as you go helps you stay ahead of the mess.
3. Divide And Conquer The Chores
One of the best ways to make cleaning with a big family easier, is to delegate chores. Everyone who lives in the home should have specific responsibilities that help the household in addition to keeping their own rooms tidy.
If you have young children at home, assign age-appropriate tasks that don’t have to be perfect. Make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do and when they are expected to do it.
4. Create A Reward System For Younger Family Members
Children and teens might need a bit of extra encouragement to clean. An allowance works for some, or you could set up a reward chart for young kids. Rewards are a good placeholder as kids begin to grow and develop intrinsic motivation.
In a way, you likely have rewards for yourself that motivate you to clean. Some of them are extrinsic (you treat yourself to a manicure), but many times, the pay-off is intrinsic — the satisfying feeling you get from a clean, comfortable home.
5. Identify The Priority Spaces
Certain spaces in your home need more attention than others, like the kitchen, bathrooms, and main living area. Dedicate more time to these areas, giving them priority over things like the home office or playroom.
If it’s a room you can shut the door on if unexpected visitors pop in, it can wait another day. Prioritize the spaces people see when they enter your home or the ones they're likely to see (bathrooms).
These spaces also typically get a lot of use, so they get dirtier more often, which warrants cleaning them more frequently. Know which spaces check this box in your house and plan accordingly when creating your house-cleaning schedule.
6. Make Sure Cleaning Products Are Kid-Safe
If you plan to have young children get in on the cleaning action, use kid-friendly products. Actually, choosing non-toxic, safe cleaning products is a good rule of thumb, kids or no kids.
It’s also essential to be extra-cognizant of what you’re using to clean your house if you have pets in the home. In addition to using safe cleaners, verify that you have tools your kids can use. For example, kid-sized or adjustable brooms and mops make these chores much easier to handle for smaller family members.
7. Don’t Skip Deep Cleans
Many people choose to deep clean their homes two to three times a year, roughly every four to six months. It’s a great idea, allowing you to get down and dirty with the grease and grime in every nook and cranny of your home.
It also helps keep regular cleaning more manageable, since the funk lurking unseen in corners doesn’t sit for years. However, if you skip a deep clean, expect the next one to take longer. The dirt and mess have more time to sit, build up, and in some cases, solidify — ick.
8. Clean First, Then Disinfect
Yes, we all want to keep germs at bay, especially in a home with lots of people. However, if your cleaning solution is to simply wipe everything with a disinfectant towel or spritz Lysol around the room, step back.
You need to clean up the yuck first, then disinfect. Simply disinfecting an area doesn’t get rid of the dust, grime, and other nasties. Plus, the disinfectant can’t do its job as well if it’s trying to work around all of this goop. So, clean first, and disinfect second.
9. Work From Top To Bottom
You spend an hour making your den floor spotless, then decide to clean your ceiling fans. The dust drops on your newly cleaned floor, and you realize you did it backward.
Work from top to bottom when you clean to maximize time and avoid backtracking. Work from ceiling to floor in a room. Start on the top floor and work your way to the bottom floor in a house, etc.
10. Give Everyone A Personal Laundry Basket
If there are eight people in your house, get eight laundry baskets. Everyone gets a personal basket to collect their own dirty clothes and gather their clean laundry.
Very young children may need assistance schlepping their baskets around. Still, having a separate basket for them makes sorting and transporting clothes and other items easier. When laundry is done, everyone pulls out their own clothes, puts them in their basket, and carries them to their room to put it away.
Once the basket fills up again with dirty clothes, they bring it back to the laundry room. Bonus points for kids who know what to do next and can wash and dry their own clothes.
11. Have A Clutter Container
Houses with lots of people accumulate stuff quickly. The more things that are in your home, the tougher it is to clean because there's more stuff to move around.
Keep a bin, box, or other container on hand for donations. As people in the home come across something they no longer want, they know to drop it in the donation bin. When the bin is full, bring it to your favorite charity of choice, then refill it.
12. Tidy Up Every Night
Embrace the art of the ten-minute tidy and teach it to everyone in the family. Basically, every night, spend ten minutes returning items to their proper places, gathering dirty clothes and dishes, and throwing away trash.
Make it a game. Set a timer and see who picks up the most stuff before the buzzer. Designate mini tasks for a tidy session. For example, everyone picks up their personal belongings. Plus, you load the dishwasher, your partner gathers random dirty clothing, and the kids pick up the dog's toys.
13. Rotate Larger Tasks
Certain cleaning tasks don’t need to happen every time you clean. You may wash the curtains every two months or vacuum and deodorize the mattress monthly.
Create a rotation list for these larger tasks, rotating through them. Make it a routine, so you can keep track of what’s done and what’s next. Perhaps you include one or two of these larger tasks in each of your regular cleaning sessions.
For example, during one cleaning session, you dust baseboards and trim, in the next one, you clean the ceiling fans. In the next, you remove and clean all the light fixture globes, then you repeat these tasks the next few sessions, etc.
14. Be Smart With Storage
Smart storage solutions always make cleaning easier with a large family because they help you contain all of the stuff. It doesn't matter how big your house is, the right storage makes a difference.
Even if you have 5,000 square feet of living space, you still need a place to put things. Be savvy with how you store items so you don’t need to shuffle a bunch of stuff around when it’s time to dust or vacuum.
Make Cleaning The House A Family Affair
A large family doesn’t have to make cleaning the house harder. Instead, use it to your advantage to make the process easier and less stressful. Delegate chores, get rid of clutter, and stick to a schedule to streamline house cleaning. The result is more time to spend with your family that doesn’t involve dust cloths and disinfectant.
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Stacy Randall is a wife, mother, and freelance writer from NOLA that has always had a love for DIY projects, home organization, and making spaces beautiful. Together with her husband, she has been spending the last several years lovingly renovating her grandparent's former home, making it their own and learning a lot about life along the way.
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