How to Keep Your House Clean With Small Kids (From Someone Who Survived It and Is Apparently Doing It Again)

Let me be upfront: I know what I am in for. I have been here before. My daughter has a way of putting her creative confidence on display, as when she decided to paint the hallway wall.

Then there is the other one and her methodical approach to tidying the dresser, which consists of standing beside it and shoving each piece off the edge while holding my gaze. I have put in four rounds of scrubbing the kitchen floor in one afternoon because the pasta had to come out of it. You can’t miss what toddlers do to a place.

And yet we are contemplating another go at it.

I figure this is either love or insanity; I have long since given up on deciding. One thing is for sure, though: with Maria and Marina I was working with the sort of optimistic, theoretical knowledge a first-time mum has, convinced that if you just put in a good cleaning routine all will be well. This time I have the real thing. The hard-won variety, the kind you earn from having to deal with the painted walls and the pasta. Actual knowledge.

If I could go back seven years and stand in the hall looking at the damage Marina had done, this is what I would say to myself…

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The first thing to accept

You can’t have a spotless house and a toddler in it. It’s just not in the cards.

But don’t read that as a letdown. Think of it as a way to put things in perspective and spare yourself some of the day-to-day headaches. What you’re after isn’t a clean house per se, but one you can put back in order in no time, over and over, without it taking over your life.

It’s a different kind of goal, so you need a different approach.

If you try to run a home that has to be kept pristine, you’ll be at odds with your little one and you’ll come up short. Better to have a place that is easy to put right. One with less for them to get into, storage you can put something in on the fly, and counters you can have down in half a minute. The mess will be there — it always is — but you won’t be left reeling from it.

That’s where I’m coming from with what follows.

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The food situation

I’ll start with the floor, since that’s where it all seems to go in the end.

When you have a toddler, mealtimes are like they’re running some kind of test. A bit of food makes it to their mouth, a bit misses and goes over the side of the chair, and then there’s the stuff they put on the ground with an air of purpose, as if they’ve been at it for years. Marina went through a period of being done with her meal, picking up the bowl and inverting it. On purpose. With eye contact.

Here is what has made life a little easier:

Put a splat mat in the high chair. I mean one of those wipeable ones for the whole eating zone. It turns what would be a chore into a 30-second job. You won’t find a more useful thing for this stage of parenting; I can’t recommend it enough to any new parents.

If you can, have the high chair on a hard surface, not a rug. Tucking the rug away isn’t giving in, it’s just being smart.

Suction-cup plates and bowls. Maria put an end to those in about three weeks. Marina didn’t even try. But you should give them a shot.

And for the love of it, clean as you go. Let a spot sit and it becomes a problem. A bit of pasta on the tile after 30 seconds is no trouble; leave it for three hours and it’s a different story. Don’t think “I’ll do it in a minute.” By the time you get around to it, your toddler will have put his foot in it.

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The wall situation

You can put it down to Marina. She put some color on the hallway wall, though not with any paint from a can. It was something of hers from the bathroom I’m not sure what to make of yet. Purple. Good for a square or two where you’d have a window. And she beamed about it.

That, and the like of it — there have been a few of those — has taught me a thing or two. If you’re living with a toddler, you don’t have a choice in the matter: you need washable paint. It’s as much a part of the house’s structure as anything else. Any wall they can get to should be in a finish you can stand up to. Eggshell is the bare minimum; go for satinwood if you mean to.

When you’re at it at 7 a.m. with no coffee in you, you’ll appreciate the gap between having to re-paint a flat matt wall and just being able to put a rag to an eggshell one.

Have a cloth on hand for this kind of thing. Not in the locked cleaning closet, but where you can put your hands on it in half a minute. A Magic eraser will take care of most of what’s on the walls. Give it a try in a corner first, but for the most part they do their job in a hurry.

And let some of it be. There are marks that can wait for the kid to be down for a nap. No big deal.

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The everything-off-every-surface situation

There was a time when Maria’s dresser was covered in stuff. And then it wasn’t. Then it was, and then it wasn’t. We went through that for some eighteen months or so.

It took me a while to see the way out of it — longer than I care to say — but eventually I just made a point of not leaving anything on there. I didn’t mean to put something down and then have to pick it up; I meant to let the dresser be what it is: her space, and whatever you put on it is only there for a little while.

The rule of thumb is to leave the surfaces in any room a toddler can get to as bare as you can. It’s not about forgoing the good stuff, it’s that an empty table doesn’t need to be tidied. If there’s nothing to put there, there’s no mess to make.

Put the things you like where she can’t get at them. I don’t mean on a high shelf she’s already worked out how to scale, but in another room or in a cupboard with a latch. What you’re okay with seeing on the floor is what stays in the room. The rest has to be put away for now.

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The system that actually works

Here’s the way I like to do it: a ten-minute reset in the evening before you call it a night. Go through each room and put things right. I don’t mean a deep clean, just a reset. Put the toys away, give the surfaces a once-over, clear the floor. If you make a habit of it, it’s over in ten. Miss two nights and you’re looking at forty-five.

The trick is to have your storage work for you. Open bins for the toys, not some box with a lid you have to wrestle with. A basket for the books instead of shuffling them on a shelf. As long as there’s an easy spot for everything, you can keep to your ten minutes. Make the storage a hassle and you won’t bother.

Then once a week, one room gets a real going-over. The floors, the bathroom, whatever needs it. One day for that, not a daily thing. You can’t be the same about housework with a toddler in the house; if you try, you’ll just wear yourself out. So you have the weekly scrub and the nightly reset. That’s the whole of it.

In the kitchen, I prefer to wipe down after we’ve eaten. The counter, the hob, the high chair. It’s three minutes, four times a day. Far better than putting in half an hour later to put out a fire you should have nipped in the bud.

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The things that make all of this easier

Less stuff. If you have toddlers in the house, the best way to keep it clean is not with superior storage but by simply having fewer toys. When there are fewer of them around, there is less to put away and less to trip on or discover under a sofa cushion three weeks down the line. A good system is to rotate your stock: put half in storage and make a change every month or so. That way the floor is easier for you to deal with and the toys don’t get old for the toddler.

Closed storage in the living room. You have a lidded basket, a sideboard with its doors. Someplace to put the toys when the day is done and they can be shut away from view. There is a certain visual pleasure in the ten-minute reset once it all vanishes behind a door. It is more of a motivator than you might think; a room that has been put to rights and looks properly tidy is something else entirely to one that still has an air of chaos about it.

Washable everything. Put the washable paint on your walls and, if you can, get a sofa with wipeable fabric. Go for a rug you can put in the wash instead of something pricey. The toddler years are no time to be fretting over a fine rug or the kind of sofa you have an attachment to; you can have those down the road. At present, it is best to have things that can stand up to what is in store.

Accepting that some days the system doesn’t work. There are days when the pasta goes on the floor four times and the wall gets something on it and the dresser gets cleared again and the toy basket gets emptied thirty seconds after being filled. Those days exist. The system isn’t for those days. The system is for making sure the other days don’t accumulate into a state of permanent chaos.

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What I know now that I didn’t know then

I have a habit of over-cleaning at inopportune times. I’d put in forty-five minutes on a room with the toddler up and about, only to be left feeling like I’d been for naught when it was back to square one in twenty.

You save the deep cleaning for naps or once they’re in bed. When they’re awake, you do what has to be done: a hasty wipe, put something back in its place, deal with the mess as it comes. It’s a matter of maintenance, not a scrub-down. I should have known better; I’ll be sure to this time around.

Then there’s the matter of the house. It doesn’t have to be spotless, just liveable. One kind of clean is for show, the other is to keep from being in disarray. With a toddler in the mix, you can only be realistic about that. A couple of toys on the floor?

That’s normal. Three days’ worth of clutter? Now we have an issue. The way to tell the difference is in your daily reset.

I get it now. But I didn’t when Marina was at her dresser for what must have been the fourteenth time and I was there, racking my brain over where I was going wrong.

Turns out, I wasn’t. It’s a toddler. They’re all like that. Until one day they aren’t, the house is in order and you find yourself missing it for no good reason.

You know why we’re at it again.

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A Final Thought

Let’s say you are in the middle of it at the moment: the pasta on the floor, the state of the wall, a dresser you have to put right every day. I want to be clear about one thing: this is not your house or your cleaning habits we are talking about. It is the toddler. He is just being a toddler.

So do what you need to do. Put a system in place and don’t be afraid to let the standard slide for a while. Go with washable paint, get yourself a splat mat.

Should someone drop by and see that the floor isn’t up to snuff or there is something on the wall you haven’t got around to, make them a coffee and save the apologies. You have a toddler, after all. The house is as it ought to be.

That will do for today. But if you have a tip for toddler-proofing that has been a game changer, some specific thing that works, put it in the comments. And for those of you in the thick of it who were wondering if anyone else has had to re-paint a wall: yes, they have. You’re not the only one.