January brings not only a new year and fresh start for any personal goals or resolutions, but it can also bring a fresh start for our homes. With the holidays coming to an end, it makes it the perfect time for a home reset. Imagine pressing an invisible reset button on your house, where the holiday decorations come down, the house gets put back to normal, and is cleaned and organized. Now, unfortunately a magic button that does this instantly does not exist, but with some time and effort, you can reset your home.
The chaos of Christmas not only brings bins of decorations moving in and out, but also a flood of new toys and gifts that need to find places in your home. Every year, I sit in my living room and face the overwhelming chaos and wonder where to begin. A total house reset won’t happen overnight, so there must be a process. You might have to adjust for what works best for you, but here is a process I have found to be effective.
First, the obvious, as much as I love the Christmas tree and decorations, they all have to come down.
In my house, we have a fair amount of decorations, so this takes a couple days to get everything down and packed away. I also gather all the new toys and gifts and put them in a pile so I can see all the new items and work on finding a place for them. Once that is done, I can start getting the house back to normal.
From here, I take it room by room.
Everything gets organized in each room and any new toys and gifts put away. This is a good time to declutter and get rid of things I don’t need, too. I know a lot of people do this before the holidays, but I find in helpful after the holidays, too. For instance, I might get a gift that can replace an old one in my house. Did you get new travel mugs or tumblers? Then you can get rid of an old one or two. It works for my kids as well, when I try to have them get rid of things before the holidays, they are reluctant. But after the holidays, when they know they have new things, they find letting go easier. For instance, my son got a new toy cash register this year, which means he is now willing to get rid of the broken one he has been hanging onto.
Next, each room gets cleaned
It makes it easier to clean everything since the decorations are down and every room usually needs a cleaning after the holidays anyway. Cleaning includes the typical dusting, vacuuming and wiping things down. Both the cleaning and organizing take awhile, so I try to do one room per day, so overall the process can take a couple weeks, but it’s worth it in the end.
Finally, my favorite part, the everyday decorations go back up.
This is always fun because it is the final step, there is a light at the end of the reset tunnel! And I get to decorate, which I love to do. Sometimes I keep things the same, sometimes I change it up based on holiday gifts, too. For example, my husband and I got each other some new canvas art for Christmas that we need find a good spot on the walls to hang up.
And that it’s it! After this long, overwhelming process, I can sit back and look at all my hard work in my newly cleaned and organized house. I would say the reset is the hard part, but if you have kids, you can probably guess the hard part is keeping it this way. Which is why it will need to be organized again and also why you can find me doing another reset at this time again next year!
