Why do I want my house to be clean?

For the past month or so I've been posting pictures on Facebook and I even wrote a post about this topic here. I've been struggling with keeping my house clean because there were constantly toys everywhere!!! Well, we went through the playroom and living room thoroughly one weekend and got rid of some more toys that the kids don't play with anymore. We got a 9 cube storage unit for the playroom and moved the little kiddie table from the corner to the middle of the room. That table gets a lot more use now than it ever did in the corner!!

We have a new rule that we clean up before snack time every night before bed. We also clean up before lunch on weekends and the days that I don't work. This has been working very well and I can honestly say that I feel great since we started doing this. With Little E I still have to help him with it a bit, but once I show him that we are putting things into bins, he follows. And Big E fights me sometime with cleaning up but I just tell her that she doesn't get lunch or snack until it is cleaned up and then she starts.

It's so funny how a small change like this can make me feel so good, but it does. Just looking around the house and seeing it all cleaned up makes me happy and feel accomplished. I wish I could say the rest of the house looks as good as the downstairs does, but it doesn't. I'm slowly working on that though. I need to clean off the top of my dresser and clean out my closet sometime soon. I also need to go through both kids' closets and drawers and weed out the clothes that don't fit him!! Little E is in 18 month clothing and I still have 12 month pants in his drawers!! Before you know it he will be wearing size 24 months!!!

In the past I would stress out about not having enough time to clean up and having toys all over the place. But I finally feel like I've found a system that works for us. Sure I still have dishes piling up in the sink every now and then and sometimes the counters aren't the cleanest, but that's ok. Another thing I'm proud of is that I'm teaching my kids at a young age to keep the house clean and pick up after themselves! I remember when I was younger that my bedroom was almost always a mess!! Maybe I wasn't taught at a young age to pick up like I'm doing with my kids, who knows.

Time to clean up!

One room in the house that we struggle with keeping clean is the playroom!! Big E is 3 and a half now so she definitely understands what it means to clean up. Now Little E on the other hand, he still just tries to take toys out as soon as you go to put them away. Occasionally he will put toys away when he sees us put them away, but that's very rare.

So since we had a hard time putting all the toys away in the playroom, I decided to go through them and get rid of the ones that weren't played with. There were a lot of tiny toys that we just didn't need. Here is the before and after of one section of the playroom.

 

The other big area of the room that has a lot of toys in it is the stuffed animals bin. My amazing husband built the kids a little stuffed animal zoo type thing and it is great!!! But the kiddos have way to many stuffed animals. I've tried before to get rid of some but there's just so many that have sentimental value so I can't get rid of them. But I went through them yet again and got rid of a full trash bag of them!

 

It doesn't look like that much of a change, but at least I got rid of some of them. Here is another before and after of the playroom. I am very pleased with how it looks and am definitely going to make sure that Big E and Little E clean up after each time they are done playing in it.