Cleaning toilets and sorting toys is rarely the glamorous pictures we see on Instagram. But, this hidden work – done without applause or even sometimes noticing – is the work that forms us and forms our homes into a place that disciples our children to know and love God. The Hidden Work of the Home is Worth it. Read on and find some encouragement and some tips to make this work both more manageable while recognizing its meaning.
S4E5 – What Do Jerusalem, Athens & Rome Have to Do With Your Faith? – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast
- S4E5 – What Do Jerusalem, Athens & Rome Have to Do With Your Faith?
- S4E4 – You Don't Have to Agree With Them to Learn From Them: Why You Should Study Church History
- S4E3 – Bible Alone? Can We Really Just Follow the Bible?
- S4E2 – What If Questioning Your Faith Isn’t a Bad Thing?
- S4E1 – Before You Pass Down Your Faith, Ask Yourself This
Hi, I’m Cayce Fletcher, and this is A More Beautiful Life Collective. I’m here to walk hand in hand with you as you grow in grace, build with purpose, and live a more beautiful life.
We had a party planned for New Year’s Eve, so of course the day before was spent cleaning and scrubbing – and painting all the markings on the walls. It stretched on and on, and before I knew it, the dinner we were supposed to go to started and ended, and I still hadn’t left yet. I was still furiously mopping when people started to arrive.
Can you relate to the panic cleaning parts of life? It may not be the cleaning of your home, but there are always areas of life that have a tendency to get out of control. Just last week, my husband’s brother needed to borrow his truck, and my husband had to spend an hour just getting it presentable.
When I was first married, I would grab some cleaner and rags and wipe down the whole house in an hour. After washing the sheets and vacuuming the floor, I could wrap up a cleaning session with time to spare before lunch.
Homemaking with a house full of littles is a whole different story. When your hands are full, it seems like you can never keep up – not with the laundry, not with the dishes, not with the mess. Our house rarely looks perfect – and the truth is we really shouldn’t expect it to.
So, the perfect house and the perfect homemaking routine don’t really exist. If we aren’t trying to pursue perfection, what are we trying to do? What should the goals of our homemaking be?
Today, we’re going to talk about homemaking when your hands are full, when your house is full of people, and the mess they make. We are going to reframe our perspective, while also giving some tips so that we aren’t driven crazy with the mess. Let’s talk about it.
What is your home for: The Real Goal of Homemaking
I love a good scroll on Pinterest. One of my boards is called “My Future Home.” I created it during my college years when I moved apartments 5-6 times. I imagined that once I got married and ‘settled down’, I would be able to make all these dreams happen.
But then, the first house I moved into was a construction zone. Those first two years just felt like a waiting time. I thought, well, once I finish the house, then I can finally make my house feel like a home.
That time never came. All the hopes and dreams we had for that house were passed on to someone else who eventually bought it and moved in.
When we moved into the house that I currently live in, I realized that our perfect dream house is just an illusion. We have to make the most of the house that we live in, just like we have to make the most of the lives we currently have.
The goal of our homes isn’t to have them perfectly designed to match a certain aesthetic. It doesn’t exist for a magazine spread, Pinterest board, or social media post. If we try to curate, clean, and stage our homes in this way, we will ultimately be disappointed because real people make messes.
Real people have likes and dislikes, hobbies and interests. Real people have clothes, dishes, and toys.
Our homes don’t exist for a picture; they exist for the people who live in them.
And perfection in our homes isn’t the goal; formation is.
Where we are formed into the image of Christ.
Our house exists to be a place where that formation happens. It’s a place where we shepherd our children’s hearts, teaching them to love what is good, true, and beautiful. It is also the place where we are sanctified – through our relationships, our spiritual disciplines, and the work of our hands.
Related: Three Simple Cleaning Routines to get and keep your home in tip-top shape!
Kneaded, Shaped, and Proved To Be Like Christ
In the center of our kitchen is our curved island – the gathering place of our home. It is where my kids eat their breakfast in the morning. It is where our guests congregate when they come over. And, it is where you’ll find me prepping almost every meal we eat.
This island is rarely cleared off. You’ll often find my planner, mail, a tool or two, toys, and a loaf of bread and butter. Sometimes you’ll find flour dusted across the surface where I’ve made our daily bread.
The rhythm of making bread has been a grounding one in the past few years. I often do a big batch every week or two (eat some, freeze some for later). I look at that bread, the work and mess required to make it, and I think of us.
Every loaf requires some amount of mixing, stretching, or kneading. It requires waiting. Shaping. Resting. Proving. And with every loaf, some flour ends up on my clothes, the counter, and the floor.
If I wanted a clean kitchen, I could skip all of that. But then I would miss the joys of a warm, fresh loaf from the oven.
We have to go through the process (and mess) of formation to achieve something worth having.
It’s true for bread. It’s true for us.
Cleaning Checklists for Daily & Weekly Routines | Faith-Based Home Organization Printable | 5-Page PDF with Habit Tracker & Prayer
These printable cleaning checklists offer a simple and faith-filled approach to home care. Includes daily + weekly tasks, habit tracker, customizable planner, and a prayer for homemakers.
Reframing Our Homes for the Goal of Formation
So, if our homes are meant to be for formation, then it frees us from so much of the weight of perfection.
My daughter, in true second-child fashion, is a wild and free spirit. She has drawn on our walls, climbed up the drawers in her closet, and rearranged all of her furniture during naptime. It’s not uncommon for me to sort through all of her clothes, folded nice and neat in her drawers, to only find that a few hours later she’s dumped them all out to find her favorite pink shirt.
If I were seeking perfection in my home, there would be so much frustration in this behavior. (And trust me, we have disciplined her for some of it.) But, if we are looking for formation, then this behavior becomes the proving ground for building character.
When she has to pick up her toys that she’s dumped out, she is learning to take ownership and responsibility for her actions. She is also learning a work ethic and to fight against laziness (much to her chagrin). When she is disciplined for writing on walls, she is learning how to steward her possessions and take care of what is hers and others’.
Our children don’t arrive in this world knowing how to behave. They have to be taught. They have to be shepherded.
Our homes are the best place for shepherding their hearts and teaching them the good and right paths.
When the mess comes, we need to acknowledge that it is only through the mess of formation that we can achieve the outcome we want – to launch children with strong values and integrity into the world to grow God’s kingdom.
Working Through the Mess of Formation
Speaking from experience, it’s hard to always maintain a good attitude and perspective when you are overwhelmed by all the stuff that comes with the people that we love. Here are principles that can help you navigate homemaking when your hands are full:
#1 – Set Good Boundaries
Your house – and each part of your house – is a container that gives us ‘good boundaries.’
We’ve probably all experienced a moment right before traveling:
We’ve gathered up our clothes, put them in the suitcase, but when we go to zip it shut, the zipper won’t budge. We press it down and maybe even sit on it to try to get it to inch forward. We grunt. We struggle. We have to try to get that zipper to shut.
The worst is when we have gone through this trouble only to go on vacation and not touch half the clothes that we thought we needed to pack.
Our suitcases are the perfect example of a container. There is only a finite amount of space. We can try to cram it full of things, but ultimately, the zipper will not close if we pack it too full of stuff.
Your house is a container as well. It can only fit so much stuff. We can try to put more than that, but that will only lead to it bursting at the seams.
Sometimes, when we go on vacation, if something does not fit in our suitcase, we just think that we will go and get another bag to stuff it in. But, really, what we have to choose to do is prioritize what deserves space in our bag.
When we treat our house as a finite container, we have to determine what deserves space. This automatically gives us a filter for what is necessary and what is not.
In keeping with this idea, each part of our house can then be its own container. If you homeschool, you may not have a homeschool room, but you can still have a closet, cabinet, or basket that becomes the boundary for your homeschool stuff. It shouldn’t spill out (unintentionally – strewing is a different concept) all over the house.
Crafting, books, clothes, toys – they all should have a specific place. Clutter really is just something that doesn’t have a set place to live. When we determine the boundaries of our stuff, we are also choosing a place – a bucket – for everything to go.
And, if that bucket gets too full. We know that we have to start the process of decluttering, aka prioritizing what really needs to be in that space.
Related: 15 Decluttering Questions You Need to Answer
#2 – Establish Ownership
You don’t need to be responsible for the care and upkeep of every part of your house. Assign ownership and release control to your family.
I’ve been living through the little years for a while now. With each child, it seems like the dishes and laundry triple. For a majority of this time, the weight of all the household things has been on my shoulders, but as my kids get older, I need to learn to give away some of that ownership.
This issue came into glaring focus when my husband was talking about our bedroom. He had his computer, books, instruments, and health stuff strewn across the entire room. As I broached the topic of reducing some of the stuff, he felt attacked and said, ‘I don’t have any place for any of my stuff. This is all I have, and you want to get rid of that too?’
This wasn’t really about the stuff. It was about the fact that he felt like he didn’t have any space that was really his, and at the same time, all of his stuff existed in spaces that I was ‘supposed’ to manage. I didn’t touch his stuff, and he felt like he had no place to put and organize his things. What that led to was a whole lot of nothing. Stuff just existed in a cluttered mess.
The solution? We needed to establish places for each of us to manage all of our stuff. We were responsible for those things – for making it organized and nice. But we didn’t try to micromanage each other’s space.
You may already do that in the form of your husband’s workbench in the garage or your kid’s clothes closet. But I think we can more explicitly say that each space has to be under the domain of the person responsible for that space.
That means your kids need to be responsible for their rooms. It teaches responsibility while also teaching the very crucial skill of how to manage our stuff (or manage our affluence, as I heard one podcast interviewee put it).
For each of the buckets that we’ve mentioned before, you should establish ownership. True, many spaces of the home will be ‘ruled’ by you, but you can start to include others in the process of managing aspects of those spaces, like the dishwasher, vacuuming, or taking care of the animals.
#3 – Reduce Your Stuff
Reduce your stuff and activities by at least ⅓. Rotate that ⅓ into ‘storage’ for a season, and then, at the end, choose what you want to keep and declutter the rest.
What really allows the first two rules to happen is this last rule. In Simplicity Parenting, Kim John Payne talks about the effects of clutter on our kids. The best way to foster play and reduce chaos in our homes is to reduce the amount of stuff in our homes.
When I first read through the book, I kind of scoffed. I am not a minimalist by any means – and I think minimalism as a goal can inhibit our ability to be hospitable.
That being said, I reached a breaking point earlier this month when my son’s room was a disaster.
He was told to start picking up. And he didn’t.
Then, he was told he needed to pick up any toys he wanted to keep. He picked up about half and then gave up.
I looked at the amount he had left, and it was still plenty to play with. That’s when I realized there was just too much.
But I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing out all those toys. My son is also pretty sentimental.
So, this is what we decided to do. Instead of trying to keep and manage toys, we are implementing a toy rotation. BUT, our toy rotation isn’t determined by the type of toys – instead, it’s by volume.
What this means is that we just reduced the volume of each type of toy and put that in a big box to store. We are going to keep them in storage for about 6-9 weeks. Then, at the end of that time, we are going to reintroduce some toys back into the mix and then get rid of toys that have never been asked about. Then, we’ll sort out another ⅓-½.
We have already done this with the toys in my son’s room, but next up are the toys in my daughter’s room. I can already see a big difference in the ‘clean up’ process between the two rooms.
This principle can help with toys, but can truly be applied to any area of life. If we find that our ‘bucket’ is too full and we need help paring down what we own, we can reduce what we have by ⅓. We don’t need to feel like we have to get rid of these things permanently, but we can put them in storage. Once they are out of sight, we might be surprised at what we find we don’t need.
Related: 4 Steps for Decluttering Your Home
Homemaking When Your Hands Are Full
Homemaking is a lofty work that is all-encompassing. Through the work of homemaking, we are being transformed more into the image of Christ. Through the work of homemaking, we are shepherding our children. Through the work of homemaking, we are making a light in our homes that shines out into the darkness of the world.
This is not a little task. It is worthy of our time, our sacrifice, our attention.
When our hands are full, and the house is teeming with little people, the tasks of homemaking may seem never-ending. But take heart. “Do not despise the little things because God is working even in this.” (Zech 4.10)
Would you have any tips to add to this list? Are you already implementing these things? I’d love to hear about it! Comment below and share your thoughts.
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If you are looking for some ‘small wins’ this week, download the free Organize Your Home guide. You can go deeper with the art of faithful homemaking with The Faithful Homekeeper, found in the AMBL shop.
Until next time, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.
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