This, my friends, is my daughter’s room. By all accounts, she is a “messy girl.” She drops her school bag on the floor the moment she walks in the front door and doesn’t look back. When she plays with toys, reads books, or colors, the thought of cleaning up her mess only crosses her mind when I give her “the mom look.” Don’t get me wrong, she enjoys a clean space, but she doesn’t enjoy it enough to actually do it without some prompting. While I may not like it, I totally get her because I was her. As a child I collected everything, let clothes stay exactly where I took them off and didn’t think about when my sheets were changed. This may surprise you given my current profession but God did not bless me with a natural need for CLEAN.
Keeping my space (bedroom, dorm room, and now home) clean is something I have worked really hard at and still find challenging. When you walk in my home you will rarely see a perfect space with “everything in its place and a place for everything.” Although I admire those of you with this innate sense of clean freakishness (and I mean that in the most loving way!), it is just not me, and I’m okay with that. If it’s not you either, I want to give you hope! Here are a few tips for my fellow Messy Girls:
It’s all about the clutter!
I’ve spoken to hundreds of women about this, written many articles on it, and regularly sing the praises of Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. While I don’t feel the need to wave goodbye to every shirt from 20 years ago, I do feel she has so many nuggets of wisdom which will help you immensely. Here’s the deal: you will NEVER achieve a home that stays clean if you keep everything. I don’t care if you buy a thousand bins, label them and store them nicely – the reality is you’re putting clutter in “clutter boxes” and pretending to be “organized”. It just doesn’t work. I’m all about baskets and bins but clutter is clutter and the first step to a clean home is to declutter. If you need help on that PLEASE for the love of all things clean…read this book!
Placement is powerful!
Okay, so I may be contradicting what I said earlier, but the phrase “everything in its place and a place for everything” really has some great wisdom. I can still hear my dad saying this to me, and I still roll my eyes. Whether I like it or not, the saying is true. Put your items back in this same place every time you’re done using them. Did you get that last part? That is the key. This is not easy and doesn’t happen in every room of my home (see above picture), but I do try to have one central place for every single thing.
Willpower is a lie!
What’s that you say? You don’t have the willpower to keep your home clean? Well, guess what – not only is willpower a lie, willpower isn’t even a real thing. I am convinced of this and have honestly just come to this liberating realization recently. I don’t care if it is losing weight, getting in shape or keeping your home cleaned, it has NOTHING to do with willpower and everything to do with taking massive action. It takes approximately 30 days for something to become a habit and usually we can only create one or two habits at a time. So, instead of feeling like a failure because your home is messy all the time, decide today to pick on thing you’ll take action on. Maybe starting today you’ll never let your clothes hit your floor, and decide every single time you’re changing you will either put it in the laundry or hang it back up. Maybe you decide you will not let dishes stay in the sink so each night you load the dishwasher. It sounds so simple yet we don’t do it do we? We think, “I have no willpower to keep up on anything so I’ll quit,” but in reality, we are trying to do it ALL at the same time and willpower has nothing to do with it. Taking action is willpower in disguise.
If you were born messy like me, I want you now give yourself permission today to A) get rid of your crap, B) take all the bins and baskets that held your crap and actually use them to organize the stuff you need, and C) forget the word “willpower” and embrace the word “action”. If you take action ever single day to change your cleaning habits, you too will be a messy girl living in a clean home!
