Home Reset | Deep Cleaning + Updating Decor

After a full year of homeschooling, these first couple weeks that we're off, I am sensing the need to really do some deep cleaning. We've been organizing closets, cleaning out under our sofa and all of our furniture, going through my kids' clothes and just sorting things. Some things are old and stained. We are doing a home reset. When some of my younger kids are having their turn to do our outside farm chores, I'm usually out there helping them. This was really fun with William because we have some barn swallows that are in our barn and they just put on a show for us. It's really cute to watch them. Even if we didn't live on a property with some land and a barn, I would do whatever I could to surround my kids with living things. Just having some pets, even if it's just a fish, a garden, anything for them to watch and observe the changes every day. It's so exciting for them and they learn so much. Having farm chores teaches them responsibility and it also teaches them to think outside themselves to see the needs of another living creature. They need water, they're hungry, and also it's just so rewarding to them to see how they can contribute to the family in just some small ways. Things that they're totally capable of doing, filling up their waters, collecting the eggs, giving them fresh food. Kids want to do big things. All the things that the adults are doing, they want to be productive. They want to learn skills and whenever we can bring them into our world and teach them something that is truly meaningful, that's meaningful work. They love it. We just finished up our 15th year of homeschooling and one thing I've been noticing since we finished is all the areas of our home that just need an update. Some of it is just cleaning under and behind things. Some of my kids' clothes I've needed to just go through them carefully and things are torn, stained, don't fit anymore. Just going through little by little and catching up on a lot of these things around our home. The other day I cleaned out Benjamin's room. He's our two-year-old and just totally pulled his crib out, vacuumed under there, pulled his changing table out, went through all his drawers, all of Holland's drawers. She's our four-year-old and this just needs to be done in a lot of places in our home. With homeschooling, you always have your kids with you and although we've gotten a lot better about making our home a priority, keeping things picked up, doing our chores, keeping up with our routines, sometimes you really do just need to stop and take time to catch up on some deep cleaning and other random things around the home. So summer is a great time to do this. Even shopping, for example, there are just things that are not easy to get online that I need to go out. I want to go out and look for some ways I want to update our decor and just different things that I'm looking for and that takes time. It's hard to do when you're homeschooling because you're just always going from taking care of the kids, keeping up with their schoolwork, and then making meals. So a time off during summer break is a great time to focus on all those things that you want to update. As he went along, he called caps, caps for sale, 50 cents a cap. He walked up the street and he walked down the street calling caps, caps for sale, 50 cents a cap. But nobody wanted any caps that morning. Yep, not even a red cap. First he had on his own checked cap, then a bunch of gray caps, then a bunch of brown caps, then a bunch of blue caps, and on the very top, a bunch of red caps. We have a really busy household like many of you. If you're new here, I'm married to my high school sweetheart. My name is Sherry. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom. Together, my husband and I have 10 kids. Our oldest is 20 and our youngest is two. So it's a very full home with a lot going on. We have older kids, we have middle kids, we have younger kids, and just keeping up with the daily housework really keeps us busy full time. With a big household like ours, there's not a lot of extra time in the day. We don't get up in the morning and think, oh, how are we going to fill our day? What are we going to do today? There are always things that need to be done. There are people to play with. My kids have done such a great job this week just playing together while I've been doing some deep cleaning, which is really nice. But in a big family, the work is just kind of a revolving door. You get up, you make breakfast, you clean up, you have some random things to do even when we're not doing school, and then you get started on lunch, and then there's found that if I want to get some projects done, some deep cleaning done, you almost have to just walk away from that constant motion of the work that needs to be done and just focus on that one area that you want to get done or that one project that you want to finish. And so sometimes this means that other parts of the house get behind or get messy, but that is just the way it is when you're trying to get a project done. Now, one thing I've had on my list is to move all our furniture and clean behind it. Today was the sofa. Now, this is a job I've been doing once a year, and as you can see by looking at it, I probably should be doing it more. Another thing that's a little more challenging with this sofa is that it's an L-shape, and you basically have to take If I had known how messy this was behind our sofa, I probably wouldn't have been able to relax and enjoy the time on it, but I was blissfully unaware of all this accumulating. That's another thing when you have a house full of kids. The wear and tear on your appliances, the amount of times you need to reorganize, redo something, update things, it's just more. So a job that maybe I had done for years, I would just do it once a year. Now, with a lot of kids in the home, it just needs to be done more frequently, and I'm finding this in a lot of areas. This is just one of them, but it's just kind of a principle that is true when you have a lot of people coming and going in your home. My daughter loves to bake, and she's been taking orders from my husband at work, some of his co-workers. She is making five loaves of sourdough to sell. She did such a great job at this, and I'm so proud of how hard she works to make some money on the side and to do something she loves. Talking again about the constant motion in a busy family with a lot of kids, one idea that my husband and I have been toying around with is to pay our older kids to make a meal occasionally. So I floated this around to my older teenage girls, and I asked for volunteers, is there anyone who would like to make a meal during the week? We'll pay you for it. And I had two volunteers. So we were kind of getting started on this, and they did it for the first time last week. We settled on an amount that we're going to pay them, and they're going to do this on the same days every week. And you know, even just that first week of them doing it, it was such a relief to have a break from making meals on two separate nights. I mean, both my husband and I could feel it. While that child was making dinner that night, we were just sitting on the sofa relaxing, talking with the other kids, playing. It was so wonderful. We've always tried to find ways that we can pay our kids to help with chores that are extra. Or if there's something that we would like a little relief from, and someone else is really wants to make money, why not have them do it? One other thing I have on my list that I want to do more of this summer, and something we started this week, was to do more thrifting and antique shopping. This is something also that just gets put off because there are other more urgent things that need to be done. But there's a few areas of our home that I'd like to update with pieces that you can only find at a thrift shop. Things that are unique, that are kind of hard to find online. I've found a couple antique plates at a local antique shop, and so I just want to be looking for more of those things that we can decorate our home with. So one day this week, my husband was home and had taken two of our younger boys out somewhere. So I had our girls here and our youngest son Ben, so we just dropped everything and went out shopping all morning. We found a few really cute pieces at a local thrift shop. The girls got some clothes, and it was nice to come home just with ideas of things we want to change around our house. Some of my zinnias are blooming, so it's really nice to be able to cut them and to have fresh flowers indoors. One of my good friends said she learned from an Amish woman that if you want to cut branches from a tree to use in your cut flowers, you need to pound on the root because it makes them last longer in the vase. This flower that I'm pounding on is a lilac, so the stem has, it's more like bark, so if you pound on it, the water can go up through the stem more easily, rather as opposed to fresh cut flowers that have a soft stem. So any type of bush or tree that has more of like a bark type stem pounding on the root will help. This is an adorable little dollhouse my husband found at a local Goodwill shop, and we've slowly been adding little pieces to it, and it's just something the kids really love playing with, something I want to keep updating for them. This is a beautiful vase that I found while we were thrifting, and it's just the perfect size for a nice little centerpiece on our dining room table. Brinley's loaves turned out beautiful. This is something she's really good at. She has the patience for it, and she got so many sales at my husband's job that she even got more orders, so she can definitely continue making and selling things there. We would love to find a way to help her start a micro bakery here at our house. This is something we've been talking with her about, and she's really motivated to do it. I think when kids are motivated to try something, then they will stick with it, and they'll do the work. So it's really fun to see your kids develop interest in this way. Another job I've been working on is updating our houseplants. Some of them have outgrown the pots that they're in, so I've been moving them to bigger pots, and then putting new soil in, and separating some of our houseplants, and making more to put around the house. This is just another one of those jobs that just doesn't get done in the daily grind of all the work that I have to keep up with. So I'm kind of excited to think about all I'm going to accomplish this summer having some time off. Another thing I want to do is update Ben's album for each of our kids. I don't do any fancy scrapbooks or anything, but I do like to make a picture album that shows their birth and the first one or two years of their life. I like to have it printed out, and just something that they can look through. The kids love looking through their old picture albums, and I haven't done Ben's yet, and he's two, so that's something else that's on my list. I would love to hear from you. I'm curious what kind of projects you like to work on when you get free time. What are the things in your home that need updating, that are just kind of hard to do unless you have the extra space and time in your day? Another thing I found when I was thrifting is this adorable little farb door with the American flag wreath on it. I thought this would be a nice change for Memorial Day and 4th of July, a nice summer look. I want to remind you, if you are starting your planning for the next school year, a lot of people plan for the next school year at the end of the last one. I have a lot of resources over on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. You can find several book lists over there, free copywork, lots of information about how to start homeschooling, and plenty of encouragement for homeschool families. Thank you for taking the time to follow along with me in my home reset. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.