How to keep your house tidy and organised with kids?
One thing’s for sure: when you’re a parent, you often share the same joys, questions and difficulties. As parents, we’ve all been confronted with the difficulty of keeping our apartment/house organized and tidy.
I’ll leave you with my tips for finding your way around your home and keeping it tidy 😉
Minimalism is key for a tidy home
To make tidying up your apartment or house easier, it’s important to get back to basics. I advise you to follow Marie Kondo’s Kondo method. She advocates a return to minimalism to feel more zen. To do so, you have to separate yourself from objects using her tried-and-tested method.
Indeed, it’s hard to tidy and clean an apartment full of stuff. Tidy up each of your spaces one after the other on a daily basis and throw away what’s no longer needed. No, you don’t have to keep all 300 of your children’s stick figures or all that hardened modeling clay! You can donate what you no longer need. Get in touch with associations like Emaus to donate objects/furniture/clothing or toys that are in good condition but no longer needed.
Each place has a purpose
One of the pitfalls with space, whether limited or not, is not defining a “vocation” for your space. If you want to stay organized, especially with young children, they need to know where to put their things. If each area has its own vocation, the youngest children in the house will easily find their way around. And so, be able to put things away.
Personnally a bedroom is a place to sleep. In my daughter’s room there are very only her babies and stuffed toys and her library for the nightime. All of her toys are simply in the living room, in a predefined place. A bedroom is for resting, whether for adults or children. So I will not recommend putting a desk in an adult’s bedroom as well as putting toy storage in a child’s bedroom. They’ll be stimulated by them, and that’s likely to make going to bed more complicated. My advice is to put toy storage in the living room, in the room where you play.
In the living room, you can divide up several “predefined places” to facilitate storage and avoid disturbing your little ones. The sofa-TV-reading corner, the play corner, for example, which can be fitted out with a rug and storage units for children. It’s important for your storage unit to be logical, so that your child can find his way around. You should have a corner for legos, one for modelling clay, another for drawings and erasers, board games, etc.
Teach your child to put things away properly when they’ve finished playing. Even if you have to help them at first, to encourage them to do so; after a while it will become a routine that will be replicated at school.
No tote box for an organized home
Yes, you know, that drawer where you put all those things that didn’t have a “designated place”. That drawer with the light bulbs, batteries, spare keys and so on! Just because things are small doesn’t mean they don’t have a place, and it doesn’t mean there can’t be a logic. You can buy small boxes from Ikea or elsewhere to organize this drawer.
If you’ve got a cellar, it may also be a catch-all. With that half-broken bike, or that piece of furniture which is missing a part you can’t find. Take the time one weekend or during your next vacation to sort out your cellar, then throw it away or sell it, and the space freed up can be used again for its main purpose, decluttering your home of USEFUL stuff; for example, your ‘skiing stuff’ or your tent and suitcases that you only use for a certain period of the year, or your set of gardening tools or the essentials for your car.
Sort and adapt for each season
You don’t need the same things for every season: in winter, we get out the big comforter and in summer, we put away our heavy coats. Each season it’s important to change your wardrobe;
To do this, at the end of each season I advise you to clean, fold and store everything in covers that can be shrunk by sucking in air; they’ll be smaller and take up less space; then store them in a specific place.
This tip is particularly important when you have babies and toddlers. Clothes generally don’t last into next summer, so don’t put them away if you know your child won’t be wearing that size again. You need to go straight to the donation stage, so you don’t end up with boxes of clothes in the cellar “just in case for the next child”. Keep the sentimental clothes if you need them, or your few favorite outfits, but don’t keep the rest, the gifts from grandma and grandpa that aren’t to your taste, or the spotted clothes that you’ll probably never wear again.
Everyday items that make storage easier
Honestly, there’s nothing better for your child than ikea storage units for their toys. Simple and adapted to their size, they can store their toys in the bins themselves, and we love that!
By the way, if you’re planning a trip to the capital of the country of birth Ikea, you can have a look at my post (family-friendly travel ideas).
For shoes, don’t put them in their own boxes, as you’ll soon forget where they are. Choose adapted fabric boxes that are transparent in one place, so you’ll know which shoes are in which box. Store your valuable clothes in suitable covers to avoid damaging them. Ikea also sells useful compartments for underwear and socks!
Finally, invest in high storage units to free up space, and also in a closet with a hanging space for coats, dresses, etc. Finally, buy hangers adapted to your clothes – yes, there are special hangers for pants to prevent them from constantly falling to the floor and small hangers for the baby clothes!
Tidying up continues in the kitchen!
If there’s one place that absolutely must be tidied up for reasons of hygiene, it’s the kitchen! Particularly the fridge, because even if you didn’t think it was necessary, it’ll make your life a whole lot easier.
Keep your closet organized and, as you’ve guessed, logical. Put legumes together, different types of pasta in one place, tins and jars in another.
As for the fridge, I’d advise you to buy plastic boxes to store similar foods; e.g. vegetables in a vegetable box, cheeses in a separate place, jams in another, etc.
Who says tidying can’t be fun? I can’t recommend enough watching “The Art of Tidying by Marie Kondo” and “Everything in its place with Cléa and Joanna” on Netflix if you want to change your mind 🙂
Here are my tips for keeping your apartment tidy 🙂 Let me know in the comments if you have any others, sharing is caring 🙂
