When your house is a mess and you're feeling the stress, what
you need is a friend in your ear.
Start the job and you'll see it through with Ronnie talking to
you. Make the chaos disappear.
Clean with Me podcast is here. Thanks for joining me.
This episode is going to be an evening home reset.
Of course, you could listen to it at any time of day when you
want to do just the bare minimum.
Let's get right into the episode.
I'm going to assume that you're tired and you're listening to
this. After dinner I want you to go
straight to the kitchen and start working on those dinner
dishes. OK, maybe you need to empty the
dishwasher 1st and reload it, or maybe you're going to be washing
by hand. Either way, the first step is
the pre rinse and I want you to focus on the most difficult
items first. OK, last night my husband put
some fish in the oven and a little glass casserole dish and
he forgot about it and it kind of burned onto that dish.
So what I did is I after removing those crispy fish
fillets, I sprayed that casserole dish with the Dawn
Power Wash. So that's an example of dealing
with a difficult item and getting it pre soaking.
So whether you're using a spray like the Dawn Power Wash or
you're just filling it up with hot water, a little bit of dish
soap, and maybe even a dishwasher pod, you want to get
those difficult items pre rinsed and soaking so that you can wash
the easier items while the difficult items soak.
That's the most efficient use of your time.
Just to let you know what's ahead in this episode, after 10
minutes from the beginning of the episode, we are going to
move to do a 5 minute pickup of the outer areas, especially your
main living area. OK, so that you wake up to a
clutter free house. That's crucial.
I love getting up in the morning to a clean living room and being
at Dish 0. So by working along with this
episode, you're going to get your dishes done, you're going
to get your kitchen surfaces wiped down, and you're going to
get your main outer areas picked up and that's it.
That's all we're going to do in this episode.
So hopefully you are plugging away at those dishes again, get
those difficult items free, rinsed and soaking and then
start washing the easier stuff. And by washing this could mean
filling up the sink with hot water and liquid dish soap and
submerging the dishes, washing them and rinsing them.
Or it could mean just pre rinsing under running water,
placing in the dishwasher. OK, for me it typically is both.
It just be working on your dishes, whatever that means for
you, and remember that a task expands to fill the time
allotted. We're about 3 1/2 minutes into
the episode give or take due to some editing I might do, but you
don't have a lot of time left to do the dishes.
But in this episode, I'm assuming it's just the dinner
dishes. OK, if you have 24 hours worth
of dishes to wash, you might not get it done in the allotted
time. And I understand that.
No judgment here. If you're facing a dishaster
tonight, you might need to pause the episode or re listen to it.
Or maybe just continue doing dishes instead of picking up the
outer areas when we move to that step.
OK, But for those of you who are cleaning up exactly along with
the episode and just dealing with the dishes from one meal,
we're going to spend about 6 more minutes in the kitchen.
And in about one minute we're going to do a little bit of a
detour. Assuming you've gotten your
dishes going and the difficult items soaking and you're
starting to wash things or maybe your dishwasher is halfway
loaded, we're going to do a quick detour in a few more
seconds where you're going to just quickly clear any clutter
from your countertops. Maybe there is a case of bottled
water that should be in the pantry or wherever you keep it
and it's on your kitchen island right now.
Or maybe there are some paper plates or other packaging or
trash that needs to get tossed. OK, let's deal with that
quickly. Scoop things up and put them
where they go. Maybe the seasonings are still
out from whenever you cook dinner.
Let's get that stuff put away. Let's get the mess consolidated
to the sink or maybe right next to the sink.
Because there's some things I like, I don't like to put in the
dish water, like, you know, breakable glasses and whatnot.
If you're using a dishwasher, those can go into the
dishwasher. If you're going to wash them by
hand, you might want to set them right next to the sink, but the
goal of this quick detour is to get your surfaces clear so that
you can quickly spray and wipe down those surfaces.
It's important to do that before bed.
You don't want pests to be too comfortable on your kitchen
counter. You want it clean.
You want to use a cleaning product to do it.
You want it to smell like some type of cleaning product and not
have any crumbs on it when you go to bed.
So again, we're on just a quick detour while you probably have
some dishes soaking and you're, you're into the process of doing
your dishes. You're going to spray and wipe
down your countertops, your stove top, anything else that
needs to be wiped down to get your kitchen sanitary, and it's
just going to be a speed spray and wipe down.
You're going to do it as quickly as possible.
This is not a deep clean of the kitchen because I realize the
evening reset is the hardest one, at least it is for me.
You're tired. You don't feel like doing this.
So if you tell yourself you're just going to do the bare
minimum and just get the dishes done, just get the countertops,
stove top and sink, you know, cleaned up, sanitized, and then
just quickly pick up, you will wake up to a visually
uncluttered home and it's going to feel good.
OK, Hopefully you've quickly cleared and wipe, sprayed and
wiped down the surfaces. If not, feel free to pause the
episode if you need more time or just don't work exactly along
with the episode. The important thing is that you
are working as quickly as possible in your kitchen to
reset it before bed. I want you to get back to those
dishes and finish the job. OK, you might be loading the
dishwasher or you might be scrubbing the dishes by hand,
but let's get those dishes washed.
Let's get it over with. Let's get down to dish zero.
Then, when you get up in the morning, you can empty your
dishwasher, empty your drying rack, and set yourself up for a
successful day of housekeeping. Even if you're not going to be
spending all day on housekeeping, you're going to be
able to start with a clean slate in the morning and have an
easier evening. Tomorrow night, we're going to
spend about one more minute finishing up those dinner
dishes. Don't be upset with me if this
wasn't enough time. I don't know if you have 10 kids
or if you've let the dishes pile up, but for a lot of you, this
is going to be enough time. And I'll be honest, sometimes I
like to rush you a little bit because if you wanted to spend
40 or 50 minutes cleaning, you'd probably be on one of the paid
bonus episodes right now, doing more of a whole house rescue or
a kitchen deep clean special. Special thanks to those who have
unlocked the bonus episodes by becoming a paid subscriber,
either through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or some other way,
maybe Patreon or a private arrangement you've made with me.
I appreciate that so much, but I realize not everybody is able to
subscribe to bonus content. Even just listening to these
free episodes helps me, so I definitely appreciate each and
every one of you. Hopefully by now you've gotten
your dishes done. It is time to do that 5 minute
pickup of your outer areas and you're going to decide which
areas to pick up. And also it's going to kind of
depend on your family size and the ages of your kids, if you
have them and your lifestyle and what kind of pets you have, how
much you're able to pick up in 5 minutes.
OK, maybe you just need to pick up a few straight items from the
living room and straighten your cushions and throw pillows.
Or maybe you just want to get all the toys into the toy box
and just get the get the floor picked up.
But if you're at a stage of life where there's not a lot of
clutter on the floor, you might be able to go through your whole
house picking things up. You might be able to head to the
bedroom and put your shoes in the closet.
But most of you probably should focus on the outer areas.
Your entryway, your living room, your family room, your hallway,
or just one, one of two living areas maybe.
I think a lot of people who have both a living room and a family
room keep one of those rooms perpetually tidy.
Those floor plans where you have a living room on the front of
the house and then you have a family room further back where
you're actually hanging out with the family.
And that's why you call it the family room.
A lot of times in those kinds of houses, the living room stays
picked up. You know, there might be a rule,
no toys in the living room, but for those of us with just one
living area, it is quicker to pick up.
But at the same time, it's kind of a challenge.
Definitely just be picking up your outer areas where I while I
talk, But definitely there are pros and cons to different floor
plans and sizes of of home. When I had a tiny house, and I
mean, I, I don't mean one of those tiny houses where it's
super small, but I'm talking about simply because I didn't
have enough storage space. But then if you have a huge
house, you've got a lot more surface cleaning to do, you have
more bathrooms, more dusting, more vacuuming, more mopping.
That can be a lot too. Now I live in a what I would
consider maybe a medium sized house and I do feel like the
living room gets cluttered quicker due to the fact that I
don't have a family room meaning a second living area.
One of my most important solutions is simply having a toy
box in the living room where I can quickly put things and then
when it starts to get too full I move some of the toys out to the
garage toy box. And I'm talking about toys for
my grandkids. But maybe you have young
children or pets that are spreading toys out.
If the living area you're picking up is far from the
kitchen, you might want to consider getting a wastebasket
if that would make it easier for you to keep it tidy.
And it's not just toy boxes, necessarily.
Sometimes just a decorative box or basket of some sort in the
corner will give you a place to quickly stash things, which is
also nice if you're expecting if you find out company is coming
over on short notice. When you're picking up, it's
always a good time. It time to kind of when you're
doing a quick pick up, it's always a good time to kind of
evaluate how the room got that messy and what kind of solution
might prevent it from getting as messy in the future.
Could be that you have too many toys in circulation.
It could be that you don't have enough storage.
Maybe you need a storage Ottoman or some type of basket to stash
under a side table. Or like I said, maybe you need a
wastebasket. We don't have a wastebasket in
our living room because it's right next to the kitchen.
So trash gets taken to the kitchen.
But we do have toy boxes. Well, we have one basket for
toys currently. It used to be toy boxes, plural,
But we have a lot of other storage.
We have a pop up coffee table where we keep supplies for the
fish tank. We have a drawer in the side
table where some of my daughter's art supplies.
I mean, she's definitely not allowed to paint in the living
room, but pens and whatnot? Markers.
Anyway, I hope you got your house picked up and this was
just a quick evening reset. If you got your dishes done,
gave your countertops and stovetop A swipe, and picked up
your main living area, you can go to bed now.
Or maybe you did this reset right after dinner and you're
going to relax with your family and do whatever your evening
routine is, whether it's story time and bath time with the kids
or watching a movie with your husband.
Last night, my husband and kids and I played Yahtzee together.
That was super fun. Anyway, thank you so much for
listening. I hope your home is tidy and
your dishes are done. If not, it might be time to
listen to another episode. Happy cleaning and I'll talk to
you soon.