The Secret to a Tidy Living Room

Do you want to know the Secret to a Clean and Tidy Living Room?

Invite someone over, regularly.

We just finished Week 6 of 34 Weeks of Clean and our project this past week was to clean the Living Room thoroughly.

This was an Easy Breezy project, as my daughter likes to say, in our home and I'll tell you why.

We host several functions in our home each month. Some church, some family, but all preplanned.  The bottom line is we have visitors EVERY week to our home so it's part of my Weekly Homekeeping Plan to clean the living room every Friday.

This is one of the best ways to keep on your cleaning. Put your home on display on a regular basis.

I learned this tip from Emily Barnes. Having people over puts you into tidy mode. It causes you to clean when you otherwise would have ignored the mess (cause I surely would have).

Our regular entertaining has put a weekly home cleaning on our Weekly To Do list and the Living Room is right there at the top!

We move the furniture and vacuum underneath, wipe the window sill, clean the windows, my daughter dusts the shelves and piano, we remove anything not belonging and voila! We're done.

Now you can see from my pictures that our living room is still in a “to be finished” mode and that also helps keep it clean. There isn't much there.

• 1 couch
• 1 clublike chair
• 1 piano
• 2 tall bookshelves
• 1 small bookshelf (piano books)
• 1 stereo system
• 2 plants

Now all this cleaning is done the night before any entertaining as to cause me little stress.

But what if you have visitors that have announced they are dropping by in say and hour or even half an hour?

Well I have plan for that. Several years ago I wrote this post A Clean Home, Fast. It's nice to have an emergency plan for those little or no notice times.

So what all this means is that when it came time to do my weekly challenge there wasn't much to do. That particular room gets Spring Cleaned each week and since it's done so often the mess doesn't build up and it doesn't take long to do.

My goal is to get back into a Room Rotation schedule where each room in the home gets a deep cleaning focus. I only spend 15 minutes a day in that room and the cleaning IS NOT done every day. Just two or three.  This puts deep cleaning on auto-pilot.

While all this cleaning was going on my daughter got out her Homemade Family Guide (idea courtesy of [simpleazon-link asin=”B00E6PUYT2″ locale=”us”]Road to Avonlea[/simpleazon-link]) and made sure I was doing her little list.

Have you joined us for the 34 Weeks of Clean Challenge yet? It's not too late to dive in