The Home Reset: Mastering Systems and Cultivating Habits for a Better House, Condo, or Apartment

When life happens, an Insta-worthy organized closet is not worth striving for...but, your home can still be your soft place to land.

Karissa Barker (@karissaathome) loves to pore over aesthetic home organization and décor books. But to be perfectly honest, none has ever given her the tools to change the way things work in her home. Most are little more than a motivational speech with pretty pictures. When she was new to keeping house and life got extra busy or overwhelming, she wished she had someone to hold her hand and give her not just a visual guide, but habits and strategies for a better, easier path to an organized home. After years of experimentation and finding out what works, Karissa offers just that in The Home Reset.

This indispensable guide collects the essential strategies and skills you can rely on to make any space--apartment, condo, or house--cleaner and better organized on a daily basis. Moving through each key room or space, Karissa outlines everything that even the busiest of families can do, always starting with key Resets and then exploring the Habits and Techniques for that space:

• Kitchen and Dining: Short and long resets, how to join the clean sink club, countertop strategies, how to involve kids, creating easy cleaning stations, considering organization and flow, eliminating clutter, how to clean countertops based on material, how to clean flooring, tips for dishes/pots/pans, creating storage in challenging spaces
• Living Room: Full living room reset and nightly resets, key habits to keep the living room livable, toy management and storage, functional furniture, special items (remotes, books, etc.) and storage, how to clean carpets and rugs, how to clean couches and chairs, how to keep ceiling fans (and lights) clean
• Bedroom: Morning and quick resets, habit stacking in the bedroom, creating organization systems that work based on your closet considerations, how to wash bedding and mattresses, how to make a bed, how to fold clothes, a closet reset, how to maximize space in a small closet, closet systems, closet habits
• Bathroom: Quick reset and nightly reset, habits for wiping and clearing, how to involve kids in the clean bathroom battle, caddies and undersink storage systems, special section on kids’ toys, makeup and personal care storage, how to organize toiletries, how to clean showers and baths, disinfecting vs. cleaning
• Entry Spaces: Quick and weekly resets, habits for shoes/keys/entry objects, shoe and coat storage with and without a closet, considering entry flow, mail storage, backpacks and special considerations, how to rotate clothes and shoes
• Laundry and the Laundry Room: The laundry room reset (or the laundry space reset depending on your area), habits to keep laundry from taking over, key products and items for doing laundry, laundry basket options, weekly strategies, how to clean the washer and dryer, DIY laundry detergent recipe, stain removal guide, how to wash different items
• Kids’ Spaces: Resets for parents and kids, helping kids create habits for a cleaner room, morning and nightly routines, creative toy storage, bedding options, cleaning up kid-centric messes, toy rotation, problem areas, how to clean and sanitize toys

Additionally, you’ll find a chapter of core skills, hacks, and tips for extra-challenging seasons of life. And a robust appendix, complete with many of Karissa’s popular checklists and printables, provide reusable material week after week. So ditch the frustration and jump in with a home reset!

Tired of being inundated with curated, picture-perfect displays of homemaking that were completely unrelatable, Karissa Barker set out to blog with a mission. She would harness the energy of Martha Stewart but design her content for a new generation. Recognizing that most people have no idea what they are doing when it comes to designing, organizing, and the upkeep of a home, Karissa built her brand on teaching solid, achievable basics. Today, she has expanded to about a million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, but she still maintains her blog, newsletter, and storefront at karissaathome.com.