Tips to Keep a Clean House: Make Your Bed!

Welcome to my new series, Tips to Keep a Clean House! This series is just what it says it is. I'll be offering you my tips on how I keep my house tidy, clean and "drop in" ready!


The fact here is, when your house is clean, don't you just feel better? I always think about that scene in the remake of The Stepford Wives with Nicole Kidman (it's back on Netflix btw). The part where she and Better Midler and their friend Roger walk into "Bobbie's" (Bette's) house, which is the biggest disaster I've ever seen, for the first time and Roger looks around and asks "Are you making Anthrax?" A clean home makes you feel better, makes your family feel better, makes any guests you have feel more welcome, and not like they just walked into a crime scene. I am HAPPIER when my house is spotless. My husband appreciates it and he is happier when everything is clean and in order.

I'm talking about a CLEAN house, not a tidy house. There are differences, and we will examine them later on in this series.

My first tip is a simple one, but it always seems to be overlooked. Every time I go into someone else's home to clean, the first thing I notice is that 90% of people leave their beds unmade. I can't handle it. I just can't.

From the time I was a tiny girl, my Mom was ingraining it into my brain to always make my bed. "Always make your bed before you leave your house!" she advised me once. "That way if you get into an accident and die, and people come into your house to get your things, they won't think you're a slob." Her exact words. I mean, if I'm dead it won't matter to me that people think I'm a slob because I didn't turn up my bedsheets. I remember laughing, out loud, at that statement, telling her that I didn't think it was that severe, and she agreed, saying she was just trying to comically make her point.


All it takes is a minute. Sometimes less, to make your bed. So why don't you do it?  For me, its the second thing I do in the morning when I get up. The first is taking Tabby out for some relief. Bless her little bladder. Next I walk back down the hall, into our bedroom, and make the bed. It's part of my routine, it's easy.

This is what our bedroom looks like when I first get up. I usually sleep for another half hour/hour after Aaron leaves for work, then I get up and start my day. And yeeees we sleep with a fan in our bedroom. We only have 1 window air conditioner and it lives in our living room. Please pardon my pink water glass. Keepin' it real, guys. I love you!

Our bedroom is always kept clean, and tidy. But to me, you couldn't tell because of the unmade bed and the stack of pillows on the bench. You can see them in the bottom right corner of the above photo.


I kind of feel stupid giving you a blow by blow about how I make my bed, but.... I'm gonna.

1. Straighten your fitted sheet. This is a must for me, because I cannot stand to get into bed and feel the sheets wadded up around my feet. So if it's popping off of the corners, tighten them back down, straighten it out as best you can. 
2. Adjust your pillows. Whether you lay them down or stand them up, get them into position. I've been standing ours up recently, it makes for a nicer appearance when our bed is fully made, I think.
3. Grab your flat sheet and pull it up and straighten it out.
4. Do the same with your quilt/comforter/blanket. 
5. Once they're lined up and even with each other, fold them over, back towards the middle of the mattress. I sometimes fold it back over on itself, to hide the sheet, but usually that's only when I'm feelin' fancy.
6. Pile on the pillows. I start with the shams that match my bedding set, then I layer my decorative pillows. What's on our bed now is a hodge podge, mish mosh of a couple of different sets, but I like the look, so I go with it.
7. Turn on your pretty little lamps (thinking about changing them out. What do you think?). move your ugly fan to a corner of the room (I usually move it to between my side of the bed and the window, it blows into the hall that way, cooling that end if the house) and take a breath. That took so much energy and so much time. You deserve a break. Go get a glass of sweet tea and rest your achy bones.

But doesn't it look so much better? It frees up the space where I store our pillows at night, so it instantly de-clutters the room.

I change the sheets on the bed once a week, usually on Mondays. However, I am a clean freak, as we all well know, and I sometimes change the sheets twice or three times a week. It depends on a number of things, including how hot it is outside-how much we sweat during the night-, how violent Tabby gets in her sleep, sometimes she tosses and turns so much I swear she's rubbing her butt bald, how much the sheets have stretched etc. I wash our mattress cover and pillow covers (the hypo-allergenic anti-bedbug type covers) once a month or so, along with the quilt or comforter that is on the bed at the present moment. Depending on my mood, I sometimes go through phases where I spray the bedding down daily with Febreeze. I mean, we do have a dog that we share the bed with, so... there's that.


So that's my first tip to keeping a clean house. Make your bed. EVERY DAY. Even on Saturday. Your bedroom will feel more clean and more glamorous if you do!

Home Style Evolution: The Bedroom

The "Master" Bedroom in our house has seen many a change in the 5 years that we've lived here. It's so easy to swap out bedding and curtains that I find myself doing it a lot. I get so bored with bedroom decor, and my tastes for that room are constantly changing.

Since we've lived here I've had 7... possibly more... different bedding sets on our bed. I told you, I get bored with it. I'm on the hunt for something new even as I type this. So please be advised that this post was written in advance and by the time it actually goes up on the blog, the bedding and/or curtains my have changes. You've been warned!


When we first "took possession" of the house (for those that don't know, we rent this house from my Father in Law, and he gave us permission to do anything to this house we wanted, except knocking down walls or adding on rooms.) I really had no clue how I wanted our bedroom to look. I'd never shared a bedroom with someone, and at the time, I was in a dark and twisty place, so I liked dark rooms and modern clean lines, thinking I wanted to go as far away from the super clean/country look that my Mother has always used to decorate her home.

Our bedroom is nothing special architecturally. It has this long window on one wall and a regular size window on the wall to the right, and a regular sliding door closet that you can step into but not walk around in.

The closet doors. Inside is a ClosetMaid system that my brother in law put in when he and my sister in law lived in the house while they were building their current home,

My bedroom at my parents home had 2 walls painted a chocolate brown and two walls painted a really pretty medium blue. I had an iron scrolling pattern bed with brown and blue bedding. So I just figured, I do the same thing in my new bedroom with my new roomie ;)

So we set out on the journey to make our house a home...

Here is the inside of the closet. It holds SOOOOO much more than I expected it too. My husband and I are such clothes horses. True Story, when we moved in, we considered turning the 2nd bedroom into a closet because we have so many clothes. ;) 

Aaron, and me, a couple of love struck, soon-to-be-wed kids, painting our bedroom.

As you can see from the photo above we chose a very dark brown color for the bedroom (the hallway walls hadn't been painted yet). Again, as with the old paint color in the bathroom, I have blocked out the name of the color, but it can be found at Sherwin Williams,  Don't you just LOVE my hair in that picture?? (Couldn't you feel the sarcasm dripping off of that question?)

We finished the bedroom, added our curtains, furniture and decor, and this was how it looked 4 days before our wedding, and 12 days before we came back from our honeymoon and moved in.

Bedding from Target. Curtains from Burlington Coat Factory. Print on wall from AllPosters.com, lamps and shades from Dollar General.

Oh dear. Looking back at it now I want to beat myself over the head with an iron skillet. I said I was in a dark place. I meant that metaphorically and literally. I began to refer to our bedroom as "the cave." Romantic, right?

Our curtains were a last minute find from BCF, and I ended up choosing them because they were a light color and they were on sale. Almost from the minute they were hung, I regretted them, but lived with them.

Our bedroom furniture set did not come with any nightstands, so we improvised. I didn't realize how badly I needed a nightstand until I didn't have one.

And in the moving process everything got "arranged" on our dresser. People that see this picture joke that our house must be haunted because off all the "orbs" in this picture. It's a dusty old house, what can I say? I love it, it's home. 

There's that light bulb.

We came back from our honeymoon on Dec. 20th, and started living in the house. We were so lucky when we "moved in," my best friend and her husband and I spent a whole day the week of our wedding moving my things from my parents house, which was about 40 minutes away, and Aaron moved his things (basically just clothes and odds and ends) the day before the "big day." Anything else that needed to be taken care of, our parents did for us while we were gone honeymoonin'. We have the best FRAMILY anyone could ever wish for!

So we started our lives together in this house. And really quickly I decided the bedding needed a change. 

Springtime 2010 came along and Aaron and I found ourselves in a tight spot, career wise. Aaron left his job at a bank and started pursuing his current job as an insurance agent (I am so stupidly proud of how hard my man works!) and I was working weekends at a bridal shop while finishing up school. We changed what we could in our house when we could. This was our first try with "shop whatcha got."

AAAAHHH!!! Scary, I know. Apparently I forgot how to make a bed.

 This bedding was what had been in my bedroom at my parents house before I got married and moved. (We still use this bedding in the winter months, it's held up great.) It was from Target and I'm pretty sure my Mom and I found it on a deeeeeeep clearance sale there by accident one afternoon. 

The bedding doesn't even go with the curtains, but I thought I was in Heaven, I suspect. I was young and stupid, can't fault me for learning a lesson.

 We lightened things up a bit in August of 2010 (due to the ridiculous heat and the fact that we only have one window air conditioner in the entire house, and it's in the living room) and started using this reversible brown/beige quilt, also from Target. "GOES" better with the curtains but this poor room still looked like a mish-mosh. And I can't do mish-moshes. Sorry. I just can't. 

See anything different in the above picture? The little canvas basket tower sitting to the side of the bed... ok. Those were gifts from my father in law for Christmas in 2009. He knows how I love to organize things and so when he saw those he said he knew he had to get them for me. We used them as nightstands for a couple of years. It was big enough that I could lay my cell phone and my glasses on at night. It served its purpose and is now in the big cheap organizing/furniture store in the sky. (I saved the baskets, they're the perfect size for little odds and ends.)

Finally in July of 2011, I'd had all I could take. I had started a new job, and Aaron's new career was taking off like a jet plane, and so we had a little extra money, so I decided that I was going to repaint the bedroom, and give it a good updating.

I took a day off work, and my Mom did the same to come help me - she's always up for any project I ask her to help me with- and while my sweetie was gone to work, she and I did a bedroom overhaul!

Please excuse the blurry photo. I was very excited.

Pretty amazing change, yeah?

I found this bedding from a website called KingLinen.com. I've bought several items from them before. Their bedding is SERIOUSLY discounted, like this was a $150 set I got for $60. Not all of their items are super high quality, and not super luxurious and fluffy, but it is all really nice and very pretty and will last a good while if you take care of it properly. 

I fell in love with it cause it "matched" my curtains, and therefore I didn't have to buy new ones!

Do you see my old teddy bear peeking out? My Mom made him for me when I was 2 and I can't part with him.

 We spent $30 on a set of cheap, put-them-together-yourself nightstands from Family Dollar. They were so wonderful compared to what we had been using. I will never regret spending the money for them and using them for the time we did.

Our dresser.... still a mish-mosh. I did really like having my jewelry right there, but the little organizers kept falling off the wall and chipping the paint. So I finally got rid of them. Do you recognize the shape of those candle sticks?? They're the same ones from The Power of Spray Paint at 2am!

We had almost completely overhauled our bedroom. We took it from that "poop brown" color - that was what I was calling it near the end - to this beautiful light tan shade called "Oak Barrel" from Sherwin Williams. Now both of the bedrooms in our house are painted this same color. Not a whole ton of money was spent, but the room itself was so much brighter, and happier. We really were pleased with the outcome. 

For a while... c'mon, you had to know that was coming.

One night, Aaron and Tabby (our dog) and I were sound asleep in our bed, when all of a sudden we hear a snapping sound and the mattress falls clean through to the floor. The cheap slats in our cheap bed had broken, and the side rails had split in two. Our bed was broken. We didn't go to a high end furniture store to buy furniture in our early days. We went to a discount store and bought the cheapest of whatever we could. 

So...to keep from having to sleep on a mattress on the floor (nothing wrong with that, but we tend to have mice in this old house), Aaron and I propped the bed up with milk crates and crawled back in to finish out the night.

This lasted for a good few months before I'd had enough. We had recently purchased a new set of living room furniture from Ashley Furniture, a cousin of Aaron's works there, and I knew she could get us a dynamite deal on a new bed and maybe some real nightstands. Our dresser and chest of drawers were holding up very well, so we really didn't need to replace them. And we still haven't. Maybe one day we will, but for now, what we have is working just fine. 

I thought changing out the bedding might help me "deal" with it. I mean, as long as the mattress was centered on those milk crates, we were fine and everything we level and even. I started referring to the bedroom as "The Beige Palace," because everything was so monotone. So I changed up the bedding to this and a few weeks later my Mom and I decided to rebuild the bed from the inside out. And for a while, everything was hunky-dorey again.

Quilt from Overstock.com, white throw from SAM's club, pillows from a local fabric store. Big pillow in front was made by my Mama and has our names and wedding date in a big heart. ;)

 That bedding lasted until it got cold outside and we needed something warmer. (Me and my bedding, jeez.)

 So one Sunday afternoon after church, Aaron and my Mom and I stop in at Ashley's "just to look." Yeah right. 

Just to look my foot. 4 hours later Aaron and I have looked at every bed in the store, and argued over more than a handful. The one we both really wanted simply would not have fit in our room, and we toyed with the idea of whether to just deal with it and buy it. But when I saw the bed we eventually got, I knew I could dress it way up and make it look really rich, or dress it down and make it look really country. It took some wiggling on my part, but I finally got Aaron on board and we left that night having purchased the queen size "Porter" bed and matching nightstands.

 It's a really dark photo, but it had taken us absolutely all day (from like 10am to dark) to get the bed put together and made etc. That is the same Target bedding from my teenage bedroom, many years ago. Our lamps came in a set from Lowe's and you will see where they had originally been when I take you through the evolution of our living room next week. The bench sitting at the foot of my bed was a surprise from Aaron the Christmas before last in 2012, from Kirklands and I believe it was around $170 (I have since this photo moved it so that we can see our beautiful foot board). Our curtains I got for a steal off of... wait for it... AMAZON.COM for about $7 a set (just search sheer curtain panels and they should pop up). I kept the brown swag at the top to kind of bring all the browns together, but I may remove it later on, depending on what I come up with for my bedding.  We have new artwork on that side wall! That came from Kohl's and it was originally $80, and I got it for $15. (Don't worry, I didn't get rid of the couple kissing in Paris, I love that picture too much. You'll see it again next week!) The two little pictures to the side are some of our wedding shots that I had printed from my partner lab/ And hanging above my lamp is a little hand stitched sign that says "I see the moon and the moon sees me, God bless the moon and god bless me. Amen." I bought it at a craft fair the summer before we got married.

So that is what our bedroom looked like throughout the first part of this year, the winter months, and now that we are on into spring, Aaron and I were simply suffocating at night underneath that big comforter, even with our trusty floor fan going. So I decided to swap out to the beige quilt we'd been using before it turned cold last year. I am on the hunt for a beautiful blue quilt to replace it. If anyone has any ideas, please comment below and let me know where I can find one! 

Our little master bedroom has underdone so massive changes in the 5 years that we've lived here, and frankly, it's still evolving. I'm happy with it for the first time in a long time, and I am insane over my new bed and how beautiful it is.



Thanks for walking through the transformation with me! Next week I will share my LIVING ROOM with you, and how it has changed (intensely) in the 5 years that we've lived here!