Organized Home

It's Autumn.

Pumpkins glow in golden fields. Shorter days, crisp mornings signal winter's approach.

Can the holidays be far behind?

Use Autumn's brisk and breezy days to conquer deep-cleaning chores for a clean and comfortable winter home, and wrap up summer's outdoor areas.

Our Fall Cleaning Chore Checklist will help you prepare home and hearth for the coming of winter:    More »

Summer's here, hot, high and sweaty. Vacations beckon. The garden takes on a life of its own.

Busy families don't have much time for home chores these months. School's out, travel's in and it's easy to let life slide on the home front. Still, summer will run more smoothly if you keep tabs on these important areas in the Summer Cleaning Chore Checklist.

Our summer cleaning chore checklist list tackles hot-weather issues, summer health and safety:    More »

Who doesn't love commercial cleaning wipes? They're wickedly convenient--but also wickedly expensive and often contain harsh chemicals. The alternative: make your own refillable cleaning wipes!

Homemade cleaning wipes are easy to make, economical, and contain only those cleaning agents you select. Use them in the kitchen, the bathroom, or for cleaning windows.

Put homemade cleaning wipes to work for you in your organized home with our easy instructions:    More »

Is it time to clean? Not for today's busy families. Between work, children's activities, and vacation plans, even the most leisurely days don't seem long enough to get everything done at home. 

There's a solution for busy times! Just as your body needs a "minimum daily allowance" of vitamins and minerals, an organized home needs a minimum of maintenance and attention to keep running smoothly.

Think of this as a Magic Minimum: a short list of essential household tasks. It's a bottom-line list of chores and activities necessary to keep things running at a basic level. With a working Magic Minimum plan, the household stays afloat, even when time is short.     More »

Systems analysis. So weighty. So professional. So mysterious. Yet nothing can streamline an organized home like a well-crafted set of household systems. Today, we focus on laundry and clothing systems. What do they do? How do you develop them? What benefits will establishing laundry and clothing systems give to you and your family?

Chances are, you already have these systems in place. After all, a system is just a set of organized items, decisions or actions, designed to work together to achieve a common end. In terms of an organized home, a clothing system, for example, would be a set of related decisions, actions or items, designed to work together to supply family members with an adequate supply of clean, well-fitting and appropriate clothes.

However, there are systems, and there are systems. In a disorganized home, systems springs up unassisted. There's no thought or planning underlying them, so they don't work particularly well. Most of the time, the steps of the system are only instituted when things break down: there are no clean clothes, so someone does the wash. Yes, clothing gets clean, eventually--but there's tremendous waste of time, money, resources and family harmony built into haphazard systems.

Does this scenario describe your household's laundry system?    More »

A cleaning apron? What, me?

Yes, you! Forget those '50's images of housewifely frou-frou and ruffles: a cleaning apron has a place in the modern home manager's toolkit.

A cleaning apron speeds cleaning chores. Spray bottles of cleaning solution hang ready for use. Apron pockets lined with plastic bags corral bits of trash. Cleaning tools live at the tips of the cleaner's fingers.

Stockpile a stack of cleaning cloths in one pocket, a cleaning sponge in another. With a cleaning apron, supplies, tools and materials are literally close to hand.

The pros know! Professional cleaners swear by cleaning aprons. Savvy home managers purchase cleaning aprons from mail order houses and janitorial supply stores to get the professional. edge on house cleaning.    More »