The 5-minute ‘closing shift’ that gives us our evenings back

Home decorator Lara Winter is one of Ideal Home's Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on revamping a 200 year old cottage to make it right for modern family life. See the rest of her articles here.

The 5-minute ‘closing shift’ that gives us our evenings backI love coming downstairs to a tidy house in the morning. Unfortunately, I don’t particularly enjoy the part where you actually have to tidy it.

Which is probably why most of the routines that stick in our house involve a timer. If I know something is only going to take five minutes, I can cope with pretty much anything. At this point, I already know my boys will each be getting a timer as a moving-out present one day. They’ll thank me eventually.

So, before the kids go upstairs for bed, we put some loud music on, set a five-minute timer and everyone gets to work.

Five minutes. That’s it.

We concentrate on our shared living spaces. Anything the boys have brought downstairs goes back up to their rooms, shoes get put away, cushions go back on the sofa and everyone takes their own cups and plates to the dishwasher.

That doesn’t mean everything has to disappear. We live here, after all. Drying artwork gets moved to one side and half-built Lego models are absolutely allowed to stay. I’ve learnt not to mess with those.

Everything has a home

The biggest thing that helps is that pretty much everything has a home. Nobody needs to spend half the five minutes wondering where something goes. Well, most of the time.

I also have a few very specific things that make a room feel messy to me. The TV cupboard doors being left open is one of them. I have no idea why it bothers me quite as much as it does, but it does. Add three remotes scattered around, a couple of mugs and a blanket half on the floor and suddenly the whole room feels untidy.

So, cupboard doors shut. Remotes away. Cups in the dishwasher. Cushions vaguely where they’re supposed to be.Boom. Living room reset.

And honestly, it’s quite impressive how much four people can tidy in five minutes when there’s a countdown involved. It turns out children can move remarkably quickly when loud music and a ticking clock are involved.

Once the timer goes off, though, the kids are finished. I think that bit is important. If five minutes mysteriously turned into twenty every evening, they’d quite rightly stop believing me.

Divide and conquer

Then my husband and I divide and conquer. Which of the two jobs is easier depends entirely on the day and, crucially, the tiredness levels of the children. One of us heads upstairs for bedtime and stories while the other tackles the kitchen. Last dishes in the dishwasher, worktops wiped down and all the random things that somehow accumulate in a kitchen during the day put back where they belong. Usually, by the time bedtime is finished, the kitchen is too.

Boom. Done. Relax.

A free evening

And that’s probably my favourite part of the whole thing. Once the kids are in bed, we’re actually free. There’s no spending the first half an hour of our evening cleaning up before we can sit down. Cup of tea. Sofa. Maybe something good on TV. Perfect.

If we’re feeling particularly organised, one of us will quickly make overnight oats and stick them in the fridge too. It takes a couple of minutes, but opening the fridge the next morning and discovering breakfast is already made always makes me feel like I’ve got my life together far more than I actually have.

Does this happen perfectly every single night? Absolutely not.

Sometimes we’re late home. Sometimes everyone is tired. Sometimes we just can’t be bothered. This is a family home, not a military operation.But that’s also why it works for us. It isn’t a big evening cleaning routine and the house certainly isn’t spotless afterwards. It’s five minutes. Everyone pitches in. Then we stop.

I don’t need to wake up to a perfect house. I just really like waking up without yesterday’s mess still waiting for me.