Bhavna
“I want to have a HUGE house one day.” “I want a big GRAND staircase right when you enter the home.” “I want TONS of extra space in my home.”
These are all things I wished for growing up and when we were searching for our first home. I dreamed of a big new built house with a big beautiful staircase. My wish definitely came true but is it something I want now?
Over the years of living in my pretty decent sized house, my taste in a home has changed A LOT. Now, let me give you a little reasoning first as to how and why we purchased such a big house as a starter home. At the time, we were a family of 4. My husband and myself and my in-laws stay with us as well. We knew in the future would also love to have children. So, we knew we wanted to buy at least a 4–5-bedroom home and luckily for us, we live in city where real estate is pretty fairly priced. We also knew that we preferred a new build. After looking at many plans with our homebuilder, we decided we wanted to have 2 bedrooms on the main floor. We wanted the master bedroom downstairs and we also wanted my in-laws’ room downstairs so that as they got older it would be easier for them. The only option we had with this homebuilder was to go with a 7-bedroom house and because this house was in our budget and we liked the layout we decided to just go with it even though it was WAY bigger then we needed or wanted.
As the girl who always wanted a big home, you can imagine how over the moon I was! I was so pumped to get into this home and start decorating and organizing and living my dream.
Are you still with me? I promise, this is all going somewhere haha.
We are now left with the downstairs of our home making good use. But the upstairs is pretty unused besides the 1 room my in-laws use.
With such a big house and a lot of rooms we simply do not need, I needed to make sure I created a space that was going to be somewhat easy for me to maintain. Keeping a 7-bedroom house with 6 people clean can be really difficult and time consuming especially if you are like me and really enjoy a clean and clutter free house.
So how do I manage to keep the second story of my house clean and organized all the time without having to clean it all the time?
I KEEP AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE UP THERE!
We have barely any furniture up there. This not only saves cleaning time, but heck, it also saved us from spending a ton of money unnecessarily.
We have nothing on the walls, totally bare.
We keep most of the closets as clutter free as possible and don’t tempt ourselves as using those spaces for storage (besides one closet).
This makes cleaning upstairs pretty quick and easy for me. Once a year, usually late December, I will clean all the light fixtures, baseboards, staircase, doors, windows and blinds and give all those things a really good deep clean and then during the rest of the year, besides sweeping, I will go up there and clean every 3-4 months.
Check out my video here to see what that general clean up looks like!
And yes, you might be saying, what a waste of square footage and I totally agree! One day we would LOVE to downsize but for now this is the house we have and the house that makes sense for us.
So, the lesson here is if you have a big house, or even a house with a second story, you don’t want to spend hours and hours cleaning it all the time. That is time you could use to relax or spend time with family or do whatever it is you enjoy. Try to create a space that is going to be easy to clean up and don’t add things to your home unnecessarily because in the long run those things will only add to your clean up time.
