3 Secrets to Keep your Home ALMOST Company Ready

Do you remember that video that went viral a couple years back?

What? That’s not descriptive enough for you?

Her name was “Gayle” and she was going crazy, feverishly picking up her house, terrorizing her family before company arrived?

Now do you remember?

Oh here, I’ll just show you.

“There cannot be any sign of living in this house!”

 

ALL that set up to say, you guys, in my early days of marriage, I could so be that person. I’ve gotten better mind you. (Chris just coughed really hard reading that.) But I know left to the worst version of myself, at the mention of company, I Megan Rea, become a cleaning nazi. My perfectionism/performance driven self tries to continually surface like an annoying whack-a-mole game.  I think it stems back to my childhood when my mom would tell me to clean my room “like Jesus was coming over.”

Yep, she went there. And my little girl self just KNEW Jesus would know if I shoved everything under my bed lol!

No worries, mom paid for my therapy and we can all laugh about it now….years later 😉

 

How do you react before company arrives?

 

Does the arrival of spontaneous company make you throw open your front door with open arms

OR

Does it make your cleaning nazi surface while keeping your guest sequestered to the front porch until the house smells like lavender and oranges?

 

 

Whenever you’re at on that spectrum, I do know this:

Clutter can make your life small. It is a huge stress trigger and shame inducer.

 

I’ve learned a few tricks after running our home front for almost 16 years and doing our fair share of entertaining. Which mostly included Youth Leader meetings and hosting large groups of student leaders in our place.

 

 

SIDE NOTE: Teenagers are a wild card and I adore them. One time, we gave our student leadership team a reading assignment and sent them off to complete it on their own in another part of our house. True Story, I found 3 girls in my walk in closet and one, wait for it, curled up in our shower stall. You can’t make that up. Oh the stories we have from 13 years of Youth Ministry! 🙂

 

 

If you’d like 3 tricks to keeping your place ALMOST company ready. AND if you’d like a pretty giant announcement from our personal life, keep on reading friend.

 

 

1. Put Away the Day

 

Each evening determine some sort of “pick-up” routine that works for you and your family. Chris and I have what we like to call, “The 10 min rule.”  We will literally set a timer for 10 min and go from room to room straightening up.  We’ve found this works awesome for different personality types. One, if you HATE cleaning, it’s only 10 min. TWO, if you’re a perfectionist, it will keep you moving instead of, oh I don’t know, organizing your spice rack, when you really should just be getting the rest of the house in order.  Here’s a couple of things we focus on when we institute the 10 min rule and #putawaytheday:

• Clear off flat surfaces. Clean surfaces are your brain’s friend. They lessen your anxiety level, help you focus, and keep you from getting distracted.
•  file your mail
•  hang up coats, bags, purses and reset for tomorrow (if you’d like help saving time getting ready in the morning, click here for a GREAT HINT)
•  clean up the kitchen. It helps me to work from left to right putting things away, loading up the dishwasher and wiping down the counter. Because if clean surfaces are your friend, dishes piled in the sink are your taunting nemesis.

SIDE NOTE: don’t get discouraged!  If you’re thinking, “10 min will not make a dent in my house,” you’re wrong. 10 min daily over the course of a week, will make a massive difference.  Don’t let yourself be all or nothing. You can always do a deep clean later in the week.

Don’t let the clutter boss you around and make your life small. You’ve got this.

 

 2. Make the bed daily

 

There are oodles of articles on the power of making your bed in the morning. Here’s a fantastic one.

On top of just the feeling of crawling into crisp sheets at the end of the day, making your bed has all kinds of other benefits.  First off, your bed takes up 85% of your visual space in the bedroom. So keeping it nice looking is an automatic de-stressor. Need more convincing? Check out this quote from

Navy Seal William H. McCraven, commander of the forces that led the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. In his 2014 commencement speech at the University of Texas. He told graduates,

“If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day.

It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.”

source

3. Have a quick clean routine before guests arrive

 

John & Sherry Petersik from Young House Love call it, “10 minutes to clean.” I say give yourself a little bigger buffer than 10 min, BUT semantics, because I love them.

You can devise your own “10 min to clean” routine, but here’s what ours looks like:

• quick clean the bathrooms: toilets, mirrors, wipe down counters & floor
• vacuum
• wipe down the kitchen counter

If you have spontaneous guests and you’re doing the daily “10 minute pick up,” this will be enough!

 

We do acknowledge however that there are times that your house must be SPOTLESS. You want it to sparkle, you want it to smell like spring time, and you want your pantry to resemble a page from House Beautiful.

And those are the times when, oh I don’t know, YOU LIST YOUR HOUSE FOR SALE.

Guess what guys? We’re selling our house. Correction. We SOLD our house.

In 2 days. Which is nothing short of shocking and Jesus.  The next few weeks from us you’ll see a couple of DIY posts and final Home Tours as we get ready for an Estate Sale and to walk out the door of our brick ranch one final time.

While of course we’re excited for a new adventure, sentimental me, who gets attached to inanimate objects, is taking it ALLLL in 😉

 

So get excited with us and please be praying for us as we losen our grip on all things familiar and jump into the unknown.  We’ll keep you posted!

And in the meantime, give us your tricks and tips! How do YOU keep your home almost company ready?

 

Until next time,

Meg (& Chris too)

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