Tidy and Bright

I've discovered that life is far more cheerful when things are tidy, though they never seem tidy enough. Alexander Pope said "order is heaven's first law," but I find that hard to achieve in the home.

The bathrooms and the kitchen may be clean but the living room is a menagerie of toys, socks, clothes, jackets, and rumpled pillows, not to mention crushed graham crackers, dust bunnies, and enough sand for an indoor beach. When that is remedied, I am still faced with heaps of laundry and envelopes full of decisions- read, pay, save, shred? It never ends.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project offered some very practical tips on keeping clutter under control in her article from the January 2012 issue of Good Housekeeping. She has a "one-minute rule" and does whatever tasks she can in one minute- pick up shoes, put something back in a drawer, wipe off the counter.

"With the one-minute rule, I can choose to do anything that needs doing, without delay, as long as I can do it within a minute," she wrote.

Her second suggestion is to tidy up the house before going to bed. She suggests doing a quick pick up of toys, coats, pillows, etc. so that the next day begins in an orderly fashion. I think this is especially helpful as a mom of young children. The house may look like mayhem by dinner, but once the little lambs are in bed, I can do a quick pick up and my world is sane once more.

A 10 item pick-up is another wonderful idea for keeping things orderly. Diana Smith, mother of nine and grandmother of seven, uses this technique when toys are strewn pell-mell around the room. Calling the children, she asks each of them to pick up 10 items- blocks, cars, puzzle pieces, or a combination of them all. By the time everyone picks up their 10 items, the mess has disappeared. Poof!

After the clutter is gone and you can finally see your furniture, try using 19th Century British textile designer William Morris' paradigm for a tidy home: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

It's also important to realize that a house will never be in perfect order and that's o.k. Mary Lou Smith, a native Arizonan, farm wife of over 50 years, mother of six, grandmother of 22, and great-grandmother of seven offered a very wise nugget of housekeeping wisdom- Keep a house clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.

I'll raise my glass to that one and to keeping our homes beautiful, useful, tidy, and happy this Christmas season.

Cheers!