I put together a quick little DIY for Brandon as a treat for Easter morning.  We get baskets every year at my parent’s house so instead of another basket full of treats I thought a little candy jar would be sweet.

My silhouette, vinyl, a mason jar and a little cotton ball were all I needed to put this little DIY together.

I was able to find the bunny outline here, turned the image into a PNG file and opened it in the silhouette software to cut it out on the vinyl.  The cotton ball  was my favorite little touch.

*thank you to Angel Crafts for the great vinyl pack which came with tons of great colors to choose from for this project!

When we were first started building our house and were searching for building plans I would drool over the giant homes with extra living rooms, more bathrooms than we would ever need, and rooms that we would have to come up with some function for because the rest of the house was already so big.  I knew then that a too big house would be more that we would want, but what I didn’t realize was two years in I would be binge watching tiny house shows on the DIY network dreaming over how perfect a tiny house, with only 400 square feet worth of space to clean, would be.

Cleaning has become my arch-nemesis.  When we first moved in, I dreamed we would start with this perfect clean slate of an untouched home and it would be so simple to keep clean.  Then reality hit and as we walked through the doors we realized the construction crew doesn’t clean nearly as well as my type-A personality would have liked (or really much at all…).  We had dust all over the baseboards, filthy air filters from the building process and little specks of paint where little specks of paint should never have been.  So I slowly got to work scrubbing the house over trying to get it to the clean I wanted it to be.  Then life happens and everyday (or what feels like every minute) a new mess is made.  I started to dread the weekends when I would have to clean a weeks worth of mess up.  I would sit on the couch with my coffee and overestimate how long it would take to clean it all and try to convince myself it wasn’t worth it. (sidenote… we don’t have children, just a very hairy dog and husband who lives for the outdoors, mud and all, so I salute all you mothers out there cleaning up after little ones too!)

I know I had to find a better way so I went to work scouring pinterest, because why re-invent the wheel, and combined some tips and tricks from across the web to find a plan that worked for us.  Now we have a cleaning schedule.  I found that completing just a simple task or two each day would keep the house clean and not fill the weekend with chores.  Some tasks are cleaning, like on Tuesday we clean toilets, and others help us tidy up around the house, __ we compile business receipts.  Brandon owns a lawn care company and is famous for dumping everything, including business receipts and checks on any open space as he empties his pockets, so we now set aside one day a week to file these all for taxes.  This little system is an ongoing process and we tweek it as we need to.

Some of my favorite products to help get me through are the Shark Freestyle, cordless is key for a quick sweep and this little guy’s battery holds a whole lot of power, the Swiffer Dry for quick pick-ups, the Shark Pocket Mop to keep the hard wood and kitchen floors sparkling and the micro fiber clothes from Pro Chef Kitchen Tools which are perfect for wiping down the stainless steel appliances in our kitchen.

After all the help I found online helping us straighten up I thought it was only fair to share what works for us, below is our list, feel free to change it to fit what you need.  (And a posted list never hurts for everyone in the family to see how they can help.)

Are you a clean everyday-er or one day binge cleaner?

 

 

{Thank you to Pro Chef Kitchen Tools for sending their micro fiber towels.  All thoughts and opinions (and cleaning skills) are my own}