Little Home Finds for Smoother Family Routines

I’m not someone who thinks a calm house comes from buying things (but I firmly believe there’s no harm in trying, ha!). Most of what keeps our weeks steady is repetition and habit building. That part is free, but there are a handful of products that help me keep those habits and routines more clear and organized. They’re just clear places and small preparations that make the next step easier, which is most of what running a house comes down to anyway.

These are the few that have done that for us lately:

Outfits ready for the morning

The most useful thing I’ve hung in a closet this year is a weekday clothes organizer: five labeled shelves, one for each school day. Outfits for the boys go in ahead of time, and the mornings run a little more smoothly, because the deciding has already happened. Deciding is the slow part.

It’s a hanging organizer that I’ve just put over the inside of their closet doors. On Sundays, I load it up for the week, and it’s one less thing on busy school mornings.

A place for every piece of cutlery

Putting the cutlery away is one of the jobs the boys can own, and the expandable bamboo cutlery organizer is what made the job clear. Every type of cutlery has its own section, so putting things away isn’t a judgment call. It’s matching. That’s the whole trick with kids and responsibility, in my experience: the clearer the place, the more independent they can be.

It expands to fit the drawer and the dividers come out, which matters more than it sounds. Measure the drawer first, and count how many sections you actually need before you decide.

Crumbs are their job too

Same principle, smaller tool. The mini dustpan and brush is another job for the kids: they sweep up their own crumbs after dinner. It’s hand sized, which is the point. A full-size broom is a chore. A little dustpan is a two-minute job a kid can finish and feel done with. My mistake was buying just one. Listening to them argue over who gets to clean is a new one!

Light for nighttime bathroom trips

The plug-in sensor night-lights have one job, and it’s a good one: they help the boys when they get up to use the bathroom at night. The motion and dusk-to-dawn sensors do the switching, so no one is feeling along a wall for a switch half asleep. They also have levels of brightness, which turned out to be the key detail for us. Enough light to find the way, not enough to wake anyone all the way up or peek under doors.

They plug straight into an outlet, which means where they go depends on where your outlets are. It’s worth walking the route once at night before you decide which two outlets get them.

The calendar on the wall

We’re a paper-calendar household in at least one spot, and I’ll admit I’m a bit of a calendar lunatic. I like to color code it and control it. The wall calendar has the full year’s worth of months, so we can add the dates we already know and nothing is a question. School holidays and breaks, fall sport schedules, birthdays, vacations, appointments: all mapped out and color coded. The visual really helps our family when we need to glimpse the month. (Ours is a Canadian listing, so there’s no link that works on both sides of the border this time.)

It runs from the beginning of September through to the end of next summer. That’s a long enough runway to actually plan around the school year, and to slot in the things worth looking forward to.

Baskets in the bathroom

Two small bathroom baskets handle the loose ends in a shared bathroom. One lives under the sink and holds the extra toilet paper rolls. When guests are coming, it comes out and sits on the back of the toilet, and it looks intentional. The other is a catch-all on the bathroom counter, which makes it easier to lift the whole thing in one hand and wipe the counter down.

A basket is the cheapest form of “a clear place” there is, and it’s the one that quietly settles a room everybody uses.

Laundry, the honest version

I went on a bit of an unhinged laundry-hamper-buying-spree when we moved into our new house. I bought one for each bedroom with the intention of collecting from everyone’s rooms… I ordered all different ones to try them out. I thought the mesh removable bags would be great to grab and go, but honestly, it’s too much work to get those bags back up and reattach before laundry starts getting dumped in again. It was actually making my laundry chore way more daunting.

So the one that’s earned its spot is the rolling laundry basket in the upstairs hall. We tuck it around a corner, but honestly, it’s cute, so I kind of want it to be seen. It’s huge. It’s easy to toss laundry in and grab it out. Everyone just dumps their stuff in. I’m about to buy another for the laundry room, for the people who strip down on the main floor, because yes, that happens. Boys.

The home finds in this post

• Weekday clothes organizer: View on Amazon
• Expandable bamboo cutlery organizer: View on Amazon
• Mini dustpan and brush: View on Amazon
• Plug-in sensor night-lights: View on Amazon
• Small bathroom baskets: View on Amazon
• Rolling laundry basket: View on Amazon

If you take one thing from this list, make it the idea rather than any product: give the next step a clear place, and prepare the small thing ahead of time. Start with the routine that wobbles most in your house, and use what you already own before you buy anything. A bin you have beats a basket you don’t. The rest of what this house keeps reordering lives in our household finds list, if you’re curious.

So tell me: what’s the small thing that made a routine easier in your house? I collect these.

Warmly,
Kristen