Collaborative post
No one wants to spend their free time taking care of their home. Obviously it needs to be cleaned regularly, and might need the occasional update or repair, but the aim is to make these tasks as efficient as possible.
Mess can build quickly in a family home, and wear and tear starts to show easily too. However, you don’t have to resign yourself to forever tidying and cleaning your home. With the right home design (and sharing the chores around), maintaining your home can be a breeze.
Think about wipeability
A family home is so much easier to take care of if you can simply wipe down surfaces. If something spills or splashes, or just needs a routine clean, you shouldn’t need special products or methods to clean it up. Being able to wipe over a surface with a cloth, wipe, or mop makes the job so much faster.
When you’re choosing materials or furniture for your home, think about how easy they are to wipe down. And don’t forget to consider stain resistance. If your kitchen worktops will stain if you don’t wipe a spill within five seconds, they’re probably not the right choice.
Make long-lasting choices
Of course, durability can’t be ignored. When you have kids running around the house, whether they’re toddlers or teenagers, you can expect that there’s going to be more wear and tear than usual. So it makes sense to choose furniture and materials for your home that are going to last longer and stand up to whatever your family throws at them.
Durability doesn’t have to be expensive, either. For example, stainless steel is a durable and affordable material to use for your kitchen sink. If you want to invest more money for greater durability and style, there are plenty of options to do that too.
Plan to combat clutter
Constant clutter can be the bane of your life in a family home. When you’re thinking about the design of your home and how you use it, making a plan to combat clutter will help you prevent it from building up all the time. The best way to do this is to think carefully about storage, including what types of storage would be useful and where to put it. Ensuring everyone has somewhere to put their belongings will help everyone stay tidy.
It’s also a good idea to think about how to prevent too much stuff from collecting in your home. Having regular decluttering sessions to clear out things you no longer need will stop junk piling up. It teaches your children good habits too.
Choose greenery carefully
If you’re a lover of all things green, having plants both inside and outside your home probably makes you happy. But the more plants you have, the more maintenance they require. If you like spending time on plant care, that’s not a problem. But if you find it takes up too much of your time, you might want to be more selective about the greenery you choose.
You could select low-maintenance plants or swap into artificial plants if you really want to cut down on your work. Artificial plants look much more realistic than they once did. If you’d rather not use them, you could try low-maintenance options such as cacti and succulents that look great indoors.
Give everyone responsibility for their own space
Every family member needs their own space so they can have privacy. Even children who are sharing a room can have their own part of it. Giving everyone their own space also allows you to teach them to care for it. When you’re designing your home, think about how you can enable everyone to tidy and clean their personal space. That might include giving them all plenty of storage, putting a wash basket in every bedroom, or just thinking about how to make each room easier to clean.
If you’re designing a child’s room and you want them to keep it tidy on their own, one thing to think about is whether they can reach everything. For example, if you want your child to put away their toys when they’re finished playing, they need to be able to reach their toy box or whatever other storage they might have in their room. If you want them to dust their bookshelves, they should be within reach.
Set up a mudroom or utility room
Your family can make some of the biggest messes coming in from outside. If it’s been raining or it’s muddy, there’s a good chance they will bring in dirt and debris from outdoors. A mudroom or utility room is the perfect solution for keeping any mess contained and preventing it from being spread throughout the house. It provides somewhere for wet outdoor garments to be hung up and for muddy shoes to be taken off and cleaned. If you have a dog, it’s also the perfect space to wipe the pooch down before letting them loose. Your mudroom or utility room can have plenty of storage and maybe some strategically placed tools, or even a sink for cleaning up.
If you don’t have space for a mudroom or utility room, you can be smart with how you plan the space around your front or back door. There might not be a lot of space to work with, but you can still include a few features to help prevent mess. For example, putting down a mat by the front door helps ensure everyone wipes their feet. A bench and some shoe cabinets will encourage everyone to take their shoes off as soon as they get inside.
Invest in quality appliances and electronics
The last thing you want to deal with during a busy week is arranging repairs for an appliance or electrical item. It can be tough to even find someone who can help you, let alone make sure someone is home when they turn up. While you can’t ever guarantee that there won’t be any problems with your appliances and electronic items, you can choose to invest in quality so that there’s a lower chance of anything going wrong. Buying a washing machine or fridge that’s robust and long-lasting will help you avoid the need for repairs.
Of course, it’s important to look after these things too. If your washing machine is mistreated, it’s more likely to experience problems that need to be fixed. As well as taking care of them yourself, ensuring the whole family knows how to operate them is a must. If you expect your teenagers to do their own laundry or help with the dishes, they need to know how to make the machine work without breaking it.
Protect your home from pets
If you have pets, you need to think about them when you design a family home. Dogs, cats and other pets might not cause untold damage, but they can still lead to some wear and tear. Thinking about how your pets could affect your home might lead you to make some different design choices. For example, you might decide not to have carpets if you’re concerned that a dog or cat might make them more difficult to keep clean and in good condition. On the other hand, there could be a risk of a dog’s claws scratching a wooden floor.
In some ways, this is a lot like considering durability in terms of the rest of your family. Wipeable surfaces and durable materials are two things you’ll need to protect your home from both kids and pets.
Organise your storage
It’s all very well having lots of storage, but it’s not much use if you have an avalanche every time you open a cupboard door. If you’re forever hunting inside various types of storage, and never finding what you need, you should try to organise how you store things. This might require you to think about how you store pots and pans, or the best way to put clothes away. Sometimes it’s necessary to think of some creative solutions or use organising tools. For example, a Lazy Susan in your cupboard could make it easier to organise your herbs and spices so you can quickly find the right jar.
Home maintenance doesn’t have to eat up all of your time. A smart home design could help you cut down on the time you spend cleaning, tidying, or sorting out repairs, giving you more time to do the things you love.
The post How to design a family home that’s a breeze to maintain appeared first on Growing Family.
