Raise your hand if this sounds familiar:

You know how to clean grout.
You can actually fold a fitted sheet.
You make a bed with hospital corners every time you put those perfectly folded fresh sheets on the bed.
You know the order of cleaning tasks matters (and understand dusting before vacuuming before mopping).
You can boil grease off a frying pan and steam your microwave clean if you absolutely have to.

Great. Now, keep your hand up if this sounds familiar:

I have no idea how to maintain a tidy home.

If you just put your hand down and you feel comfortable with the cleanliness and tidiness of your home, the delegation of duties between beings living in said home, and the regularity with which your home gets tidied… this post is not for you.

But I am THRILLED for you that you have house maintenance on lock. Give yourself a high five and get the heck out of this blog post and into something more fun for you!

Image: Tina Fey, 30 Rock, Self High Five Gif

Now.

(Is it weird to write, now that we’re alone…?)

Hi friend, with your hand still up.

You’re just like me! You’re probably, actually, really good at cleaning.

What you likely never learned – and what no one really talks about – is how to maintain a home. Cleaning and maintaining are two completely different skills, and most of us were only taught one but shamed for the other.

The problem isn’t cleaning — it’s constant cleaning

A messy house isn’t just chaotic to live in, it’s laden with emotional landmines.

Look at this pile and feel like you’re failing because you can’t find the motivation to sort and process the mail consistently. Look that way and feel guilt for spending so much money on clothes that aren’t hung up on hangers or neatly folded in drawers – they’re on your “floordrobe,”

Read the captions on any #CleanTok and your worst fears about yourself are confirmed. Dirty house? You must be lazy, broken, and bad at life.

But if you think about who you really are, you have proof of the opposite. Maybe you have a family, a job, pets, aging parents and family members who depend on you more and more, a garden, volunteer commitments, and other responsibilities. You show up for the people and projects in your life that matter. You have proof that you can work really hard AND do a really good job somewhere in your life – your relationships, your work, your interests.

So it’s not actually that you’re lazy or broken or bad.

You’re probably tired of cleaning the same things over and over again and never feeling like it stays that way (because it doesn’t).

You mop the floors, and they’re muddy again 24 hours later.
You catch up on dishes, and the next meal undoes all your work.
You clean the bathroom, and someone immediately forgets how to aim.

It’s not just exhausting—it’s demoralizing.

So what happens? You push it off (easier to ignore than do chores, amiright?). Maybe, if you’re like me, you let it slide until you’re hosting a celebration with people you don’t want to show your chaos to, or maybe, one day, you just can’t stand it anymore

And then… you do a big, angry, all-day clean and swear you’ll never let it get that bad again.

Until it does.

I knew how to clean really well

I grew up knowing how to clean, and not to toot my own horn, but I was great at it.

I learned how to scrub a bathroom top to bottom in the right order so I didn’t have to redo anything.
I learned how to fold towels into thirds, how to wrap fitted and flat sheets into a tidy little linen parcel, how to dust high to low and left to right.
I was taught to do every cleaning task with precision and pride.

But here’s the thing: we had a house cleaner. She came weekly, sometimes biweekly if money was tight. The house got magically reset while I was at school. My job wasn’t to maintain anything—it was just to tidy up enough so that someone else could do the real cleaning.

I never learned maintenance

I didn’t often see my parents or anyone else maintaining the home in a day-to-day rhythm. I saw a tidy home. I saw a clean home. But I didn’t see how it stayed that way.

It felt like a miracle. And I got used to that miracle.

So when I grew up and had a house of my own – and kids of my own – I kept wondering:

Why can’t I keep this house clean? I know how to clean. Why doesn’t it stay that way? What’s wrong with me?

The answer wasn’t that I was bad or lazy or wrong. It’s that I was never taught how to maintain.

And it took me twelve years of parenting to figure out that house management and maintenance are learnable skills. I learned these skills in my early forties so trust me, friend, you aren’t too old to learn them.

Life is bigger than a chore chart

In my twenties, I had a tiny little apartment.

It was less than 300 square feet right on the Cable Car line in San Francisco. It was adorable. And I would let that place get gross until I had to clean it. When my husband, Dique, and I were first married we lived in a flat that was about 800 square feet – and we tried to employ a bunch of cleaning systems. But, eventually, the cycle repeated: get messy, then marathon clean. We doubled our footprint after the birth of our second son, and with 1600 square feet, we tried even more systems.

Want to know what worked best? Hiring house cleaners. :facepalm:

Fast forward ten years and we’re now living in a gorgeous grand Victorian home in the heart of San Francisco. She (her name is Alice, yes I name everything) is 140 years old, and 2,700 square feet. Alice is is a beauty, and she’s also a beast to clean and maintain.

Image: Text that reads, “ We’re so lucky to live in such an incredible home. And. It’s a lot of work. But with The Reset, we’re taking care of our home (her name’s Alice), and each other! Next to the text is a stylized image of our home, an Italianate Victorian built in the heart of San Francisco in 1885.

Alice’s stats are thus: We’ve got two staircases (not including the outside stairs), three main living spaces, three bedrooms, two and half bathrooms, two main dining areas, a dog, two kids, 12-foot ceilings, and people over for dinner four or five nights a week.

Soot creeps in our 140-year old single pane windows from the buses that fly down our straight 24/7. Our sweet rescue retriever, Samwise, sheds on every stair step. Dique and I are constantly dirtying pots and pans making three meals and snacks a day in the kitchen since we both work from home. Our kids have friends over almost every Friday night and Saturday all day.

Did I mention we’re, uh, collectors? Hobbyists? Have ADHD and possibly other neuro-spicy conditions that have yet to be diagnosed? Dique has 6,000 comic books in our family room (named The Nerdery), all of us have been collecting Lego for 5+ years and there’s a build in every room. We’re big on books, pictures, art, action figures, Funko Pops, pillows, blankets, puzzles, and plants.

This isn’t a minimalist abode that can stay clean by default.

This is a living, breathing ecosystem.

And chore charts aren’t enough to sustain it.

What doesn’t work (especially for neuro-spicy brains)

I’ve gotten excited and tried almost every cleaning process and product out there. Some of my faves (to hate) are:

“Just clean as you go.”
“Just do one room a day.”
“Just tidy for 10 minutes every night.”

For many of us – especially those with ADHD (um, my whole family) or other neurodiverse folks – this advice doesn’t work.

We don’t think in small, linear tasks. We need flow. We need dopamine. And we need to know that when we put in the effort, the result will actually hold for a little while.

Cleaning one room a day when the rest of the house is in chaos doesn’t feel satisfying. And “cleaning as you go” only works if you remember to go back and actually have the energy to do so.

My family of spicy-brained, collector/hobbyist goofballs needed something else.

Image: Kate and Dique’s bedroom which is decorated in pale green and French blue. The bed is made, the curtains are drawn, it’s good enough.

The Reset was born out of necessity

The Così Home Reset came out of this exact need. Our kids are tweens, and I realized that I wasn’t doing them any favors by taking on the house cleaning as my own personal Mission:Impossible.

I didn’t want to holler at my family and lose my cool the day before a celebration or event because the house wasn’t clean enough and they weren’t helping enough.

I didn’t want to start from scratch EVERY TIME the house needed to be cleaned. I didn’t want to let it get “that bad” before tackling it again.

I wanted a system that:

Worked with our energy, not against it.
Included everyone in the house (no more martyr-Cinderella jokes from me!
Created a baseline of clean and tidy we could return to each week (no more marathon cleans!)

So I built one.

The Così Home Reset, which we lovingly just call, The Reset, isn’t about doing it all, all the time. It’s about doing just enough, together, in a repeatable way. It’s about maintenance, not perfection.

It’s not too late to learn

Here’s the good news. My family just started doing this a year ago and it’s changed our life. You are not behind, you can start now, too. You are not too old to build the skill of home maintenance.

And the best part? You can teach your family at the same time you’re learning it yourself.

This isn’t about being the perfect homemaker. It’s about building a rhythm that supports your life.

If this resonates with you, here’s where to begin:

Audit what you did learn about cleaning—skills, habits, rules.
Acknowledge what you didn’t learn—especially around rhythm and regularity.
Decide what you want to pass on to your family: clarity, shared effort, life skills.
Start with one reset. Just one. One Sunday. One hour. Get everyone (parents, too) to tidy and clean their personal spaces for 30 minutes. Then, move onto shared space tasks. Someone dust, someone sweep or vacuum, someone mop. Someone else do miscellaneous tasks – clean the guest bath and sweep the porch.

And if you want a guide that walks you through this whole process, grab The Reset guide for $7. In it I’ve laid out the exact system and shared the cleaning checklists we use here at home, every Sunday so you can easily customize for you family.

Maintenance isn’t magic. It’s rhythm. And it’s yours to create.

You’re not bad at cleaning — you just never learned to maintain