A Tidy House is a Tidy Mind

Today’s task is to give the house a really good once over. Mr Berry has the car today so I am house bound (it looks like it is going to be way too hot to walk anywhere, we have heaps of hills in our area), which is perfect to force me to clean and re-organise things.

I find that having an organised and mostly clean house (it is rarely tidy thanks to Miss Berry) helps us to stay organised.

A clean kitchen and tidy fridge and pantry help with cooking from scratch each day. If the benches are free from clutter and dishes and everything is nicely organised you don’t have to spend time making room and looking for ingredients before you start cooking. If you have to clean up first and then forage around the back of the pantry to find the wholegrain rice and can of chick peas that you swore you bought the other month, a quick 20 minute meal can take 40 minutes or even longer if you have to do the days dishes first.


No thanks. I need to be in and out of the kitchen with dinner made in the evenings – it is arsenic hour after all.

This theory leads to the rest of the house too. If clothes are folded and put away then getting ready in the morning can be effortless. Having a place for your bills means that things are paid on time and nothing goes astray. Not having everything lying around also means that there is no need to rush around tidying the house when people are dropping by. Unless of course, you don’t mind your house looking like a brothel, in which case why are you reading a post on keeping your house clean?

If you are yet to have a system for your housework or if you are new to this then I would suggest sourcing some books by Shannon Lush and Jennifer Fleming called Spotless and Speed Cleaning.

Spotless deals with stain removal (as the title suggests) but Speed Cleaning is the one for keeping your house in order. They go through each room and have tips as well as a plan for cleaning that takes 15 mins per day (although when I do it, it takes about 40mins – perhaps because of my overseer Miss Berry).

The other great thing about these books is that most of the cleaning products are based on baking soda and vinegar and avoid the need-to-use-gloves-and-a-mask-or-the-vapours-will-burn-through-your-skin-and-mucous-membranes cleaning products.

I believe they have another book called How to be Comfy but I haven’t read that one yet. Perhaps I can put that on my wish list for Santa (hope you are reading this Mr Berry).

Anyhoo, I had best start on the tidying and turn off the computer. I will post my cleaning and organising schedule over the next few months. It should also help to keep my house in order too.