How Not to Fail at Keeping Your Home Clean & Happy This Year

Someday never happens. If you continue to save your efforts for “someday” — someday I’ll go through my books, someday I’ll scrub the grout — nothing will ever get done.

That’s why New Year’s Resolutions are both powerful and precarious. Assigning a kickoff date to your goal makes it concrete. But turning your intention into something tangible also makes it feel as though you’ve already accomplished something, zapping part of your motivation in the process.

So every year, Apartment Therapy spins the concept of a New Year’s Resolution on its head. Want your home to be happier, healthier and more organized in 2018? Great. We’ll do it right now. Together. That’s why we take on the January Cure. We dive in, we do work, and we come out the other side with a handful of lessons learned: Set specific goals for your space and write them down. Change your perspective and strip things down when you feel stuck. Time yourself so you know how longs thing take and you don’t take on too much. And of course, progress is more important than perfection.

Through the Cure assignments this month, you also now know how effective it is to clean and declutter just one drawer, how much you can actually get done in three minutes and how great it feels when your floors are freshly scrubbed. You can power through deep cleaning any room in the house (even the bathroom!), and you understand the impact of simple systems like a landing strip or the outbox.

The lessons we’ve learned and the work we’ve done along the way — it all serves to set you up with a restored space and a renewed energy for keeping your home under control in the year to come. So my final assignment for you is just to keep it going.

Just keep on doing something good for your home, every day.

Take on your daily 3-minute surface sweeps and make plans to tackle a few more projects from your list.

If you’re hosting a Cure-end gathering, hop to it! I hope you and your guests have fun enjoying your fresh space. If you aren’t hosting, try to find time this weekend to make yourself a favorite meal or whatever else will make you happy and content at home.

If you missed following along with the Cure this year, all of the assignments we took on together are located right here. Feel free to take them on at your own pace, on your own self-guided program. (And stick around so you can sign up next year!)

And if you find you’re especially stimulated by the guided aspect of the Cure, I suggest signing up for Weekend Projects. Week by week, we tackle basic cleaning chores, organizing efforts, and small home projects at a natural, low-pressure, and manageable pace. You can sign up below to get weekly Friday emails with a new project assignment each time — no pressure, though. You can pick and choose what works best for you and your home, and what you have the energy or time to tackle.

Weekend Projects will kick off on February 9.

Now I’ll sign off and wish you all luck the rest of the year. Stay busy!