In this post, we are talking about the Rule of Remembering the Ones: The One-Touch Rule, One-In/One-Out, and One Load a Day. These three simple homemaking tips will make it so much easier to have a neat and tidy home. This is part of our series on Decluttering and Organizing your home. You can find the first post in the series here. Check out our shop for more resources to help you declutter and organize your home. 

Transitioning from Projects to Habits: Homemaking Tips to Make Decluttering and Organizing Stick 

Today, we are tackling the third rule for Decluttering and Organizing in our series. So far, we’ve addressed the heart issues behind our clutter, and we’ve looked at what the Bible says about keeping our lives in order. In the last few posts, we’ve talked about how to get started with decluttering and organizing. If you’ve been following along, you probably have already done a big deep clean of your home, maybe taking some things to Goodwill and getting started organizing with your own style. Today’s post will tackle three homemaking tips to help keep your home clean.

One show that I grew up watching was Clean House. Basically, the families in the show were almost hoarders. The people in the home did not know these homemaking tips. Instead, they really struggled with homemaking in general. The show’s whole goal was to come into their house, declutter, organize, and decorate so that they felt like their house was someplace they would like to be. 

At the end of this show – and lots of others like Hoarders, Marie Kondo’s show, and even Fixer Upper – there’s always a scene at the end that shows what the family is like once they’ve moved back in. What’s unspoken in these finally cut scenes is that the ‘keeping up’ of the house is the most difficult yet important part of the whole process. The people on the show needed some homemaking tips to help them keep up with their homes.

Any big change in life is challenging. It can become all-consuming. If you are moving, at some point the rest of your life will pause as you throw yourself into the project of packing up boxes, selling your home, and getting the next one ready. If you are focused on losing lots of weight, you begin to eat, sleep, breathe diet, and exercise. It often becomes the main thing you want to talk about. 

We have a tendency as humans to throw ourselves ‘all in’ to these life-changing decisions, and if we stick with it, we feel such a great sense of accomplishment when we hit our goals. 

But, the story never ends there. Without fail, life keeps moving on even when your focus starts to drift away from the goal that you’ve set for yourself. You get interested in other things that begin to take up your time. The most challenging part of making big changes to your life is getting the change to ‘stick’ after your focus drifts elsewhere. 

Ultimately, we want these big life changes that require daily consistent action to drift from being major projects that necessitate much effort to being small daily habits that are automatic and easy to do. That’s the only real way that we can make those ‘big life changes’ into something that stays year after year. 

If we don’t establish these regular habits and routines, we’ll find ourselves needing to go through the same major project in a year or two after we gain the weight back, the house gets cluttered again, or our spending and debt get out of control. 

In the case of our homes, we need some homemaking tips to help our big changes stick.

The next few posts in this series are going to help you to create those routines by giving you homemaking tips to help the decluttering and organizing you’ve already done ‘stick’ as life gets busy and your focus turns elsewhere. We are going to focus on small daily habits that will hopefully become automatic and easy to do. Today, you’ll learn some homemaking tips that will help you to create these routines.

***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***

• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• RSS Feed
• Etsy
• Spotify
• YouTube
• X
• Goodreads

Rule #3: Remember the Ones: One Touch; One in, One out; One Load a Day

One purchase that revolutionized how I kept my home and had me doing the small things daily to create a clean home is my planner. The planner I use features a series of checklists for daily to-do’s that encompasses budgeting, home care, and self-care. It also has a bible reading plan in the checklist format throughout the planner. Getting a good planner is the first homemaking tip I would give you. (Think of it as a bonus homemaking tip! You can download a free version of the checklist below!)

The reason this was so helpful to me is because it broke down the “Ones” for me that added up to a big change in how my home looked. 

I struggled with regular home upkeep when I was working. It seemed like my home was in a perpetual mess and I didn’t even know where to begin. The worst was when I was pregnant with my second and there were dishes on every counter in my kitchen. Nothing was clean, there was nowhere to cook, and we had been living off take-out for the past week because who knows what was in the fridge. 

I scoured the internet to find homemaking tips to help me get my life in some semblance of order. What I found was “the Ones.” Three simple homemaking tips that keep your home moving forward. They keep everyone fed, clean, and dressed. And, they keep clutter to a minimum. 

Homemaking Tip #1: The One-Touch Rule 

The first homemaking tip is the “One Touch” homemaking tip. The premise is simple, but this is the thing that has made the biggest difference in my home. You handle everything that you touch only once.

I wasn’t lying when I said it was simple!

So imagine you are coming home from a long day of work. The first thing that you may want to do is throw your bag, coat, and keys on the counter. Then you may flip through the mail and set it in a pile beside all of your daily things. Then, you may go to your fridge, and get a refreshing beverage. To open it, you grab the bottle opener and pop off the cap – both of which you also leave on the counter. You relax for a minute on the couch, popping off your shoes and leaving them in a pile beside the coffee table. Then, it’s time to start dinner, so you throw your remote and blanket off in a pile on the couch while a throw pillow falls to the floor. 

I could keep going, but you get the picture. 

On one hand, this is a simple picture of probably all of us at some point. This was me every day for about four years. Maybe it was you today. 

But, think about the wake of untidiness that follows this person. Everywhere they go there is something messed up in their wake. To ‘pick up’ after that person would probably take about 10 minutes. For most of us, cleaning up is the last thing that we want to do at the end of a long day. So the picking up after ourselves gets put off to the weekend. But, mess exponentially compounds (especially if you are married with kids). The ten-minute pick-up has morphed into an hour-long cleaning session, and you haven’t got to any real cleaning. You are just picking up clutter and putting it away. You have to handle everything multiple times before it gets back to its ‘home.’ 

Someone who is doing the multiple touch way might bring in their keys, lay them on the counter, need the counter to cook dinner so move them to the table, need to eat so put them in their jacket pocket. Then, they’ll forget about it tomorrow, and they’ll need to spend 10 minutes looking for their keys. 

The One Touch homemaking tip solves this problem. 

Let’s imagine how this scenario could have gone differently. You walk in and your bag, coat, and keys get hung up at your drop station ready for tomorrow. You sort your mail – which is mostly junk – and immediately throw away anything you don’t need. Your bills and important documents get set in an inbox tray on your desk. You grab a drink, open it, and put the bottle opener back where it belongs. Then, you turn on a show, and when you leave, fold the blanket on the back of the chair and leave your remote in a tray on a side table. 

Nothing about what I just described takes any more time than the first picture. The only thing different is just the habit of the person handling everything at once. As soon as you use something, you return it to its home, its original spot. 

In cooking, this could mean putting dishes directly in the dishwasher, rather than haphazardly stacked throughout the kitchen. With laundry, this could mean putting clean clothes away right after you finish a load and putting dirty clothes directly in the hamper. With papers, it could mean sorting items right away into the place they need to go. With errands, it could mean putting items that need to be taken somewhere else directly in your car or a designated spot by your door. 

Your goal is to just limit the amount of times that you are handling that one item before you return it to its home. This is a crucial homemaking tip. As you limit your time putting away things, you’ll be able to turn your focus towards actual cleaning.

Put Everything Back in its Proper Place

Now, this requires a few things of you. 

1. You need to have a home for everything in your house. If you find that there is something in your hand and you don’t know where it goes, the one-touch homemaking tip is going to fail. It will end up going in a junk drawer or in a stack on your kitchen counter where it will live until company is coming over to everything has to get picked up. You should go through the decluttering and organizing process, and then you can find homes for everything. 
2. Your ‘home’ for that item has to be clean and organized. This is especially important when it comes to dishes, trash, and laundry. Another way that our one-touch rule can get sabotaged is when we can’t put anything in its designated place because that thing isn’t ready for it. For instance, dirty dishes should either go in the sink or the dishwasher. But, if your dishwasher is clean and waiting to be emptied (or dirty and full) then you will not be able to do the one-touch homemaking tip. You will have to unload it first before you can put that dirty dish where it needs to go. This requires you to automate your systems so that you can keep every item’s home neat organized and ready for the next thing. 

The one-touch homemaking tip can drastically eliminate clutter and save you the necessary time. It’s just a habit that you have to follow consistently to see the benefits. 

If you have a family, it’s nice to have everyone on board and follow this habit too. But, be sure to give others grace. I have two littles at home that do not follow the one-touch rule. I recognize that some days I will be picking up after them quite a bit, especially if it’s rainy and we are home all day. You don’t want any standard that you have for your home to get in the way of your family enjoying your home.

As you teach your own kids these homemaking tips, they will be able to help you with the upkeep of the home, and they will carry these homemaking tips with them throughout their lives. That being said, teaching your kids about this rule will give them a jumpstart to keeping a tidy home themselves. I know that we would all be thankful to have that as adults. It’s just important to find the balance. We want to model good behavior while extending grace when others fall short. 

Homemaking Tip #2: The “One in, One out” 

This homemaking tip will help my shopaholic and deal-finder friends. When it comes to clutter, it’s like weeds. It always multiplies. We can go through a big purge and get lots of things. But, if we are not vigilant, we will find all that stuff to start creeping back into our lives.

One way to keep the stuff at bay is to practice the “One in, One out” Homemaking Tip. When you purchase something, you need to be committed to getting rid of an item that is like it. This is true when it comes to shoes, clothes, books, and toys. This will help you be thoughtful if you need that item or not. If you don’t, it’s always good to wait until later. 

It is nice to have a treat sometimes, and there are things I buy that I don’t need. But, it’s important to be intentional about what you own. This will help you to curate rather than just amass things around yourself. I love books and I own quite a few. But, I’ve started to only keep the ones I truly love. If there is one that I didn’t like or thought wasn’t worth reading, I’m okay with letting it go. 

The crucial point of this homemaking tip is that you need to curate your belongings, not just keep collecting more and more of them and then moving them around to different places.

A helpful rule for decluttering items is that if you haven’t used it, don’t love it, and could buy it for less than $20, you should feel okay with getting rid of it. Just like we talked about before, many people fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. If you’ve bought something, you’ve already spent the money. You aren’t wasting money if you get rid of it – if you don’t use it. You’re just wasting the space in your house if you hold onto it. 

If you feel torn about keeping something, it’s okay to hold onto it if you have the space. I’m not a minimalist by any means, and I hold onto quite a bit of stuff. I enjoy kitchen appliances, comfy dresses, music books, and cozy blankets. I’m not going to get rid of those things, and I don’t need to feel pressured to have the perfect number of items. Getting rid of clutter should make you feel lighter and more free, not disappointed and frustrated. If you are feeling that way, you may be getting rid of too much stuff. 

After going through and decluttering my house, there were a few things that I ended up missing that I got rid of. We decided to get a camper, and it would have been nice to have a few of the excess kitchen tools to take out to the camper. But, it also worked out. I’ve realized that you really can get by with a lot less than what you think you need. 

One way to avoid kicking yourself about getting rid of something that you need is to box it up and put it in a garage or closet. If you need something, you can just go pull it out of the box. If you find you haven’t needed it in a month, you might decide you can get rid of it. It also helps with the decision fatigue of decluttering. Looking through a box a month after the original decluttering process puts space between you and the emotions of that moment and might give you extra clarity about whether or not you truly need that item. 

Homemaking Tip #3: The “One Load a Day” Rule 

The last homemaking tip helps with the basic running of your home. We always want to be moving our home forward. We want things to be moving towards order, not decay. The two biggest areas of our home that can multiply into decay exponentially if we are not careful are dishes and laundry. 

No matter the size of your family, if you are at home for any length of time, you will end up with a sink full of dishes and a laundry basket overflowing with clothes. It’s important to have a system set up that stems the tide of the never-ending pile. These are two areas of your life that never feel ‘done.’ So you need to work in a daily routine of tackling them into your life. 

My recommendation is to do one load of each a day. Yes, you will always have laundry and dishes, but doing one load helps to keep yourself on top of those things while not feeling like it is a huge project that you have to tackle at the end of the week. 

I always try to start my dishwasher at night after dinner so it is ready to unload in the morning. With a family of four, we generate enough dishes to have a full dishwasher about once a day – coupled with my washing some pots and pans on the side. You may find that you need to run it less or more depending on the habits and numbers of your family. 

I try to shine my sink each night, another homemaking tip recommended by Flylady. You want to empty your sink by washing all your dishes and then wipe it out. Sometimes I leave a dish to soak.  I always unload my dishwasher and put away hand-washed dishes first thing in the morning, a habit I would strongly recommend adding to your morning routine, and then, wash any leftover dishes. This helps with your one-touch rule throughout the day. 

After I unload my dishwasher, I try to throw in a load of clothes to wash in the morning. While I was working, I was sometimes able to get one or two loads, washed and dried, before I left for work by doing this. If you wake up at 5, you can at least get one done. Then, I would try to fold that load when I got home. 

Folding and putting away laundry is something I still struggle with (I have about 4 loads of clean laundry waiting in my laundry room right now ready for me to fold). For a while, I would just let it pile up and fold everything on the weekends. But, what that meant was my time to do any other cleaning was taken up by folding 4+ loads of laundry. Now, I try to fold it as soon as it comes out of the dryer. Having clothes folded, even if they are not put away, makes it so much easier to get the laundry done and put away faster. 

You can put away clothes during your ten-minute tidy (which will talk about in the next post), or just make a habit of ‘clearing your laundry room counters’ when you shine your sink every night. You can start to habit stack, combining these homemaking tips with one another, as you create an ideal schedule to build your day around.

Have a Clean Home with these 3 Homemaking Tips

Because of sin, brokenness, laziness, and just life, our homes are always going to be moving toward disorder (and the world is always moving toward disorder too). Remember: “Where there is no oxen the manger is clean, but increase comes through the strength of an ox” (Prov. 14:4). On this side of the kingdom of heaven, we are always going to have messiness as a result of working and living. Did you catch that phrase in the proverbs? That messiness is almost required for the increase in our lives. 

Growth requires messiness. 

No amount of homemaking tips will get rid of the messiness altogether. The only thing that would do that would be to not have anyone live in your home.

At the same time, there are so many benefits to living a decluttered, organized, clean life. Your mental health is better. You are better able to steward your time and resources. You are in control of your things. It’s worthwhile to learn these homemaking tips.

This means that you have to learn these homemaking tips and invest in regular routines that help ease the messiness of work. I pray that the rule of Remembering the Ones helps you to establish those routines in your life.

Be sure to continue learning more homemaking tips to help you keep your home decluttered and organized. Learning from mentors is a great way to grow as a homemaker.