Guest Post: Simplifying the Home

Dear readers and friends of Christian Home keeping blog,

It is a pleasure for me to be asked by Bev to write a guest post about my home keeping tips and schedule for her blog. Bev is a lady of beauty. I love that its her hearts desire to follow the Lord, and that she has a blog created to encourage us in our roles as home keepers.

I like my home to be fresh, clean, simple and pretty. I recently titled my blog "Simply Pretty" because I want to create a simple and pretty home for my family. I believe that the key to keeping our homes organized is by living simpler. To me, that means having less material things in my home. I like the saying "Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful". I find that to be such great advice because the truth is, the more things that we have, the more we have to dust and clean!

Here are some of my tips to help with simplifying our home:
  • Start with going room to room. Keep only what is useful and what you truly love. And then give away the rest. It will make you feel so good to be able to bless others. And God will bless you too!
  • Pray that God will help you to see the beauty in the simple things. There is much beauty in simplicity. Women are creative, we can make our home look exquisite and breath taking by using a simple candle or flower in a pretty thrift shop tea cup! 
  • When your at a store and your standing there wondering if you should buy that specific item but your just not sure...Try this: say to yourself "If in doubt, go without" and leave it there and walk away! Chances are if you really love it, it will be there next time. Or maybe you will be happy that you didn't clutter up your house on something you didn't really love or need, and wont have to clean! 
  • I like to think up ways to be simple in my decorating in order to save money as well as time cleaning. So I look around my home and work with the items that I have. I've been known to do some unusual things like skipping on buying a silverware organizer and instead I throw a pretty lace linen in my silverware drawer and I literally dump the silverware into the drawer from my dishwasher. Simple, useful, and I think its looks cuter than a silverware divider. Not to mention its much easier to throw the linen in the wash instead of scrubbing those silverware dividers! I also like to purchase all the same style and color of hangers for my home. And all the same color towels because it makes things tidier.

Regarding making a home schedule, I have found that I get too overwhelmed if I make my schedule too detailed so that's why a Home Keeping binder doesn't work for me. I love the idea of one, but for me, its like having too much stuff. I need simplicity. This is what I did to make my Home keeping schedule..
  • I made a list of my Daily Tasks (my morning, afternoon and evening routine).
  • I made a list of ALL of my household cleaning and general life tasks, and from this list determined what needs to be done weekly or monthly. 
  • I found that the best way for me to view it would be by creating a blog specifically for this purpose...which you can view here.