15 Simple Habits You Should Adopt for Your Home

Inside: Add these simple habits you should adopt for your home to create a cleaner and healthier living space.

A guest post by Rose Morrison

Who doesn’t want a cleaner and healthier home? There are simple habits you can adopt in your home to make it happen. Changing up just a few parts of your routine has the potential to transform your life for the better and make you more mindful and joyful every day.

These simple habits are easy to implement in your daily routine without disrupting your other priorities. You don’t have to complete each one daily — some are better left as a once-in-a-while activity.

Regardless of which habits you choose to implement, you’re likely to see some changes. Maybe you’ll feel more prepared or accomplished, or perhaps you’ll be able to rest easy knowing that your home is clean for the next day.

Simple Habits to Adopt in Your Home for a Cleaner Space

These simple habits will help you to have a cleaner and happier home.

1. Make Your Bed

Making your bed is an easy chore that you can do first thing in the morning to get your day started on the right foot. This short activity allows you to feel more productive throughout the day because you’ve already accomplished something small just after getting up.

Completing a task first thing can help create a mindset of success for the day ahead. If you have kids, you can include making their beds as part of their morning routine too — they might feel more confident and have a cleaner room as a result.

2. Declutter & Organize Your Storage

When trying to clean out a room quickly, you may not have the time to pack everything neatly and nicely. Often, items that aren’t breakable are just thrown into a box with a promise to deal with it later.

When’s the last time you went through those storage boxes?

Consider going through one box a day until you have no more waiting for you and consuming space. You may find holiday decorations you didn’t know you had or clothes that would fit the weather outside perfectly.

You can also give away things you didn’t know were missing or know that you can live without.

3. Run Your Dishwasher More Often

Regularly run your dishwasher to prevent dishes from piling up in your kitchen.

Spend a few minutes at the end of the day loading the dishwasher and washing any dishes that can’t go in it.

Creating these daily cleaning and decluttering habits will help you to be more efficient the following day.

4. Go Through Papers

When you ignore it, junk starts to take over. If you have random papers and magazines lying around, it’s time to tackle them. Figure out which ones you need to save and which ones you’d rather throw out.

Once you’ve eliminated your piles of papers, resolve never to let them build up again. If you deal with your papers the day they come, you shouldn’t have to ever worry about sifting through a stack of papers for something important again.

You can simplify and organize paperwork in your home to prevent it from creating clutter and becoming a burden.

5. Take Off Your Shoes

If you can’t go shoeless in your own home, where can you? By instructing people to take off their shoes at the door, you can keep your carpets clean and your hardwood floors free of scratches.

Just make sure you have a place where people can store their shoes until they’re ready to retrieve them. Guests should be able to stack their shoes in cubbies or on a shoe rack so they don’t litter your entryway.

For those living in your household, limit how many pairs of shoes they can keep by the door to keep the entryway or mudroom from getting cluttered with excessive shoes.

6. Disinfect High-Touch Objects

When people come and go through your house, you may not notice how much gets touched. Things like the television remote, keyboards, and doorknobs should be sanitized regularly.

You can pick up viruses and other illnesses from high-touch surfaces, like doorknobs or buttons. To keep your household safe and healthy, make sure to sanitize at least once a week, if not more regularly. 

7. Plan Your Next Project

Part of making a house a home is personalizing your space to make it a place that you love. A good DIY project can help your home feel cleaner, more organized, or just like a more enjoyable happier space.

Consider the next DIY project you want to tackle. Whether it’s renovating a kitchen or building your first gallery wall, you might find that planning it out methodically, a piece every day will give you better clarity on how to approach your project and the amount of time it should take to complete it. Then, get started!

8. Clean the House Daily

You don’t need to clean your whole home in a single day, every day. Focus on one room at a time, and create a manageable list of tasks per day.

You may not need to deep clean a room once you have a routine in place! By establishing a habit, you’ll come to realize which areas of your home don’t get as dirty as others.

9. Wipe Your Windows

Windows should be cleaned regularly, particularly if you have animals or children who can smudge their surfaces. Aside from making it look neater, clean windows allow more light to come in, which can transform your home by brightening it up. 

10. Declutter Neglected Areas

People typically declutter closets and dresser drawers, but the kitchen’s junk drawer and the laundry room’s cabinets often go overlooked. Take the time to declutter these often neglected areas and enjoy the many benefits of having a decluttered space.

11. Streamline Your Chores

Instead of going back to the kitchen cabinet each time you need to get a new cleaning product, invest in a caddy that allows you to carry multiple things at once. Streamlining your process this way will likely make it seem more manageable, too, as you’ll only have to take one thing around with you as you move about the room.

If you’re worried about using the same cleaning objects in multiple places, consider creating a caddy for each of the rooms you plan to clean. You will only use the bathroom caddy in bathrooms, the kitchen caddy will only see the kitchen, and so on. 

This will help to simplify cleaning in your home and make it less effort.

Simple Habits to Adopt in Your Home to Be Healthier

Add these simple habits in your home to help you to be healthier too!

12. Plan Your Meals

By planning your meals and buying only groceries you will use, you can decrease waste and eat healthier. This will ensure that you use everything you purchased, saving you money and not letting your food go to waste.

Meal planning can be excellent for households on a budget because it ensures you have something to eat every night without relying on takeout. You can even use coupons to aid you in your quest for the right groceries.

Looking for some new meal planning inspiration? Here is a list of our family’s favorite easy recipes.

13. Eat One Meal Per Day Together

Multiple schedules are challenging to manage in one household, whether you’re toting kids to games or events or can’t seem to find a time to hang out with your roommate properly. Sometimes, slowing down and enjoying a meal with your loved ones is exactly what you need.

Whether it’s breakfast or dinner, you should intentionally have a meal together and connect with each other. Catch up on what is happening in each person’s life. Take turns sharing your highs and lows for the day.

Don’t use your phone usage during this time — you set the example and staying away from the screen will tell the people you’re eating with that you cherish their time.

14. Read a Chapter Each Night

Plenty of people remember reading for fun as kids, so why does it have to change when they grow up? Make a plan to get through your backlog of books by reading a chapter in a book every night.

Create a cozy reading corner you can visit before bed. Reading can boost your empathy and help you sleep better, so it’s no wonder people often advise swapping the screen for a book.

15. Express Your Gratitude

Take time to express your gratitude for your home. Sometimes, people take for granted that they have a temperature-controlled shelter over their heads that stores things like clothes and food to take care of them.

Practicing gratitude can make you happier, and you’ll be more likely to accomplish more, too. Take a moment to see your home for its benefits rather than its flaws or features you want to change.

Even if your home isn’t your dream, there are still things you can find to love about it.

Which of These Simple Habits will You Adopt In Your Home?

When you change little things, the rest of your life adjusts around them. You might start to see a difference in how smooth and straightforward your life has become after doing a few of these things daily.

Your mindset may change, too, and you won’t feel bogged down by dirt and distractions as much anymore. Implementing minor changes is key to finding a lifetime of happiness and making a difference in your life, as well as the lives of others.

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