Simple House Rules For a Well-Run Home
- May 24
- 7 min read
There are some individual habits that help us keep our homes running smoothly. I have curated 10 of my favorites for you. If some of these are new to you, experiment with them and see how they work for you. The more of them you can implement, the smoother your home will run. Will these simple house rules for a well-run home actually work for you? There's only one way to tell...
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Simple House Rules
Simplify your mail/paperwork system - create a 3-bin paper system. This system works best if it's near where you would naturally process mail and paperwork. Our system lives in our foyer.
Action Bin - a small bin for everything that requires action (e.g., bill to be paid, kids' permission slip to be signed, RSVP card to be completed). Set a weekly reminder on your phone to sort through the action bin. At that time, address everything that needs to be completed in the next 7 days. Leave the rest for next week.
Short-Term/Time-Will-Tell-Bin - another small bin where you keep things you might want to come back to. (eg. coupons you might need, a flier about an event you might attend, and catalogs.) These are items that don't require action, but you might want to reference or use them in the near future. When you address the upcoming week in your action bin, take a couple of moments to scan through this bin and toss anything that is no longer of interest to you.
Long-term file - there isn't that much paperwork you need to keep long-term, but there's always something. Keep a small file folder to store papers you know you want to hold onto for several months/years. This could be receipts, warranty info, tax documents, etc. Keep it simple. I like to have a folder for each family member, a household folder, a vehicle folder, and a tax folder. Sort through once a year to pare down anything you no longer need.
While the 3-bin paper system works for most of the day-to-day paper, we often also need a fire-safe file for things like previous years' taxes, passports, social security cards, etc. This fire-safe file can live in the basement or the back of a closet because you likely won't need to access it often.
Store items where you use them - this may sound obvious, but we often choose homes for our items based on where our parents kept something, where we kept it in our last home, or simply where we think they should be stored. However, for your home to function well, you want to keep items where you use them. Here are a couple of oddball examples that help explain the rule: if you do your young daughter's hair in the dining room every morning while she eats her breakfast, store hair accessories in a cute basket right in the dining room. Or, maybe you often store toilet paper in the linen closet because that's where your mom kept it, but maybe it would be more useful to store it in the bathroom closet. In the kitchen, this looks like creating zones. Common kitchen zones are a coffee/drink zone, a dinner prep area, and maybe even a homework zone.
Keep a crap basket - This can help prevent junk from piling up on your flat surfaces. Sometimes things come into our house without a home of their own, so they end up cluttering our flat surfaces. Create a crap basket to simply pick up all the homeless items lying around at the end of the day. Or, better yet, place them in your typical drop zones, and when you are tempted to just set random items down, put them directly into the basket instead. Tomorrow, if someone is looking for a random item they were using yesterday, they know to look first in the crap basket. Every week or every month, you can look through the basket and toss anything nobody has needed.
Create Time-Will-Tell baskets: The crap basket is a type of Time-Will-Tell basket, but here I'm talking about a more intentional use of this tool. This is one of my favorites because it takes the worry out of decluttering. If you are on the fence about whether you really want to get rid of something, you can place it in this basket. If, after a certain amount of time, you haven't gone into the basket to take something back out, you know it's safe to let it go. This allows you to experience a simplified space without worrying about getting rid of something you shouldn't. Here are my favorite places/times to use a time-will-tell box/bin/basket.
For clothes! If you have clothes you aren't wearing but are hesitant to get rid of, put them in a time-will-tell box, put a date on it, and store the box away. If you don't go back to the box, donate it. You can experiment with a capsule wardrobe with no risk!
For kitchen gadgets and extras. When you're trying to simplify your kitchen, it can be scary to get rid of items you might need. Create a kitchen time-will-tell bin to store away. You get to experience a clutter-free kitchen without the stress of making a mistake.
Bathroom time-will-tell. I know I am not the only one who collects random toiletries and skincare items that I rarely use. It could be that you picked up something new, and the item you were currently using moved to the back of the shelf, or you attended a skin-care party and bought a lipliner you haven't yet used. Maybe you feel confident and can just toss these items, but for many of us, we hold on to the idea that we will use them in the future, so we hate to get rid of them. Get a small bin you can keep right in your bathroom. When you use up a product, before buying something new, check your time-will-tell bin.
Decor time-will-tell. This will likely have to be a big bin, or maybe you have space in a guestroom closet or in your basement. Walk around your house and remove some of the decor you currently have to sweep or dust around. A simplified space is easier to clean. You will likely find that you enjoy your house more when you have less decor, as long as the decor you keep are your favorite items.
Do hard tasks more often. Does that sound counterintuitive? Many of the tasks we struggle with (eg, dishes, laundry, cleaning the stovetop) are difficult chores when we leave them undone for too long. If you do your dishes every day, it takes only a few minutes. However, if you wait several days, you have a mountain to get through, and they likely have dried food and grime that you need to scrub off. If you wipe down your kitchen stovetop after every meal, spills are easy to wipe up. Leave it, and yeah, it becomes a huge headache.
Figure out your laundry system. Since I mentioned laundry above, let's keep talking about this. I did a whole video about laundry systems HERE. There are a few different ways to schedule laundry, and the one that works for you will very much depend on the size of your family, your schedule, and your personality. You might choose to combine all the laundry into one load of everything dirty every day. You might choose to schedule each family member's laundry on a given day. Or, if your family isn't too big, you might choose to do all laundry on one day a week. What schedule works best for you? Maybe it's time to try something different from what you have been doing.
Remove excessive duplicates. Look around your house and consider why you have multiples of certain items. I'm not saying you shouldn't have any duplicates, but question the ones you have and see where you could decrease your inventory. For example...
Kitchen Utensils - how many spatulas, knives, mixing bowls, food storage containers, etc, do you need?
Kitchen Dishes - how many plates, how many glasses, how many coffee cups do you really need/use?
Clothes - look through everyones wardrobes. Did you realize you have 4 gray t-shirts? How many pairs of jeans do you really wear? Do you have several pairs of winter boots? Do you actually wear them all?
Sheets - How many sets of sheets do you need? You might need more if you have several young kids, but as they get older, you need less. And, even if an accident happens and you don't have clean sheets to put on the bed, is it really the end of the world to sleep on a bare mattress for the last few hours of the night? Not having clean sheets in the middle of the night is not the end of the world.
Towels: How many do you have? Do you need that many? Just like our sheets, we just wash towels and then hang them right back up in the bathroom. We do keep 2 extra towels for guests to use. It works fine.
Plan Use-It-Up weeks. This is where you meal plan, starting with items currently in your pantry/freezer/fridge. Attempt to use at least one main ingredient from your pantry for every meal. Try to empty out the freezer and make space in your pantry. Get creative. Gameify it. See how long you can go without grocery shopping.
Simplify your wardrobe. Plus your kid's clothes too! I know it sounds weird, but when your closet is simplified down to only clothes that fit you and are in-season, it removes so much stress from your day. It makes getting dressed so easy.
Keep a Donation Box. I keep 2 donation boxes in my home, always. I have one upstairs in a guest bedroom. When I put on a piece of clothing, and I decide I don't like it, I take it right back off and put it in the donation box. I also keep a box downstairs for household items. Whenever I come across an item that we no longer need, it goes right in the box. When either box is nearly full, it is taken to the vehicle for drop-off at the donation center.
Bonus - Challenge yourself to a No-Buy month. Some people will even do a No-Buy year. The rules of a No-Buy are that you don't buy anything that isn't a necessity (still buy basic groceries, pay your bills, etc). You can also replace something that wears out or breaks. Essentially, it gives you a break from buying non-essentials. This is a great habit to use when you are trying to declutter your home. Stop the influx while you assess what you already have.
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