7 Ways Of Managing Housework With The Kids At Home 24/7

I don’t know about you, but in the last year, we’ve been in lockdown several times as a family.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day about how and when I squeeze in housework with all my kids at home, and I decided to share some of what I do here.

These things work well for me, so I hope you can adopt or adapt them to suit your situation if you’re feeling that you want to see improvements in this area:

1. Cleaning the house by room or area

As you may have read in this blog, last year I adopted a cleaning system that has revolutionized the way I do housework.

It’s called TOMM and basically you clean the house by room or group of rooms on different days of the week.

If you want to read more about it, just click here.

Doing the cleaning this way really helps it not become overwhelming.

Also, by cleaning a room or group of rooms at a time, the house is never completely dirty. As you can imagine, that in itself saves my sanity!

2. Doing a load of washing a day

The point is not to let the washing accumulate.

By doing at least one load a day, I avoid spending hours dealing with it all at once.

A load of washing a day keeps the doctor away!

My only exception to this rule is at the weekend, when I try to have a day off. Then on Mondays I do two loads.

3. Only ironing the bare essentials

I still might iron a couple of very creased clothes but I don’t worry about most of them.

No one in my zoom meetings is going to notice if my trousers have creases in them!

With bedding I use a spritz of vinegar as they are drying to ease out creases.

4. Batch cooking

I’m not talking about spending hours in the kitchen, cooking large amounts of food all at once.

That’s just too overwhelming when there are so many other things to do, and I’m not completely convinced it saves that much time.

What I do is simple batch cooking, which is just making a double quantity of something I’m making anyway and saving the leftovers. These will either be put in the fridge for another meal that week, or I’ll freeze them for later use.

This works well with soups, curries, stews, and meat.

5. Getting my kids on board

I’m not at the stage of having a cleaning rota for my kids, but I do get the children involved with the housework by getting them to help with simple tasks.

These tasks are usually simple things like dusting, laying the table, putting their clothes away, tidying their rooms, and making their beds. Sometimes they even help me with cooking.

6. Menu planning and online shopping

So at the moment I have a rotational five-week meal plan, which I follow when I’m doing the online shopping.

Doing the online shopping while following the meal plan helps me focus on my shopping list. At the same time, it helps the meal plan to work around any ingredients that might be on promotion!

7. Accepting my house will never look perfect

This is true at the best of times, but even more so when everyone is at home 24/7. I simply don’t have the time or energy to tidy the whole house, the whole time. I just focus on getting the kids to tidy their toys and I tidy clutter from hotspots.

How about you? What are your favourite ways of dealing with the housework when your children are at home?