Start your Reasonably Clean process in your bedroom!

Not in the kitchen!

Don’t start in the kitchen, which will handle itself for now —because if we overhaul our cleaning system there, we’ll never get anywhere else.

Begin in your bedroom. It’s the inner sanctum. By decluttering there, wiping down, dusting, and vacuuming, you express your cooperation with your husband and your affirmation of your consecration to each other. You order your actions to your priorities: marriage first, in the most practical way.

It’s nice for your husband not to have to push things out of the way to get into bed. It’s nice for you too.

Even if baby is there (which is totally normal in the first few months), arrange the necessities neatly.

Get a laundry basket for anything that doesn’t belong in your room and a trash bag for trash!

Start around the periphery, moving whatever doesn’t belong to the center, in an orderly fashion, filling the laundry basket as you go. Wipe every surface with a damp cloth, moving clockwise around the room (or counterclockwise, I don’t mind! just pick a direction and stick with it so you don’t have to think!). Put back only what belongs.

When you’re done, put the basket outside the door, strip and make your bed, put the dirty bedding on top of the basket. Vacuum.

Whatever you do, don’t leave the room until you’ve decluttered, dusted/wiped, and then vacuumed!

Then back out with your cleaning tools and products, and put the items in the basket wherever they actually belong.

For much more on the method and reasoning, go to this post.

Don’t be this “haggard old woman carelessly mixing a recipe for corns on the fire in her sordid bedroom”!— Etching by G. Cruikshank, 1819, after Captain F. Marryat:

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As with everything here at the SFH, the best thing is for you to take what I’m saying — ideas that come from my experience raising seven children and 45 years of marriage— and apply them to your situation with discernment, prudence, and confidence — and a sense of humor!