4 Brilliant Apps That Will Streamline Your Homemaking

Inside: Trying to find a balance between working full-time and homemaking is a struggle; however with today’s modern conveniences you can streamline your homemaking with these simple-to-use apps.

Although you love technology and your cell phone is pretty much attached to your hand, you’re a little old school and like to keep track of everything on paper. You’ve thought about keeping everything on your phone, but you struggled to find time to sift your way through a million different homemaking apps in the app store. 

Apps are pretty personal. What works for one person may not work for another. 

Here are 4 apps you should try to help streamline your homemaking

Home Cleaning 

Limpio House Cleaning Planning – Free and premium $6.49 (as of this writing it’s on sale for $3.49). Available on Google Play   

Limpio is a wonderful app that keeps your cleaning on track. If cuteness motivates you, then Limpio’s your jam. 

What sets Limpio apart from other cleaning apps I’ve tried is the Pomodoro technique. If you’ve never heard of the Pomodoro technique, it’s a time management method that breaks down work into small increments of time. 

With Pomodoro, you control the work intervals yourself and you can start a break at any time. This method of time management increases the cleaning efficiency several times, by offering a timer inside each designated room. Not only can you keep track of how long it took you to clean, but you can also keep track of your breaks. 

What else is cool about Limpio is it monitors the level of cleanliness of your room separately and the entire house as a whole.   You can also view the statistics and cleaning history, which is pretty darn cool. 

There’s a free and paid version. The free version only allows you to add 5 items to each checklist, whereas the paid version gives you unlimited features and removal of ads; however, I never saw any ads on the free version. 

You can also password protect it, but why would you even want to do that? 

Cons: 

When you’re deleting something it asks if you want to delete it in Russian (I think). Everything else is in English, so I’m not sure why that part didn’t translate. 

There’s no living room or area to name your room. The room categories are as follows: Hall, Bedroom, Kitchen, Bathroom, Restroom, and Hallway. The only difference between the bathroom and the restroom is the cute little images. 

Overall, I enjoy Limpio and to me, it was worth the price. 

Household Inventory 

I know a lot of people use Trello for their homemaking organization. Trello is great, however, the restrictions they’ve imposed make it a tad more difficult if you’d like to have more than 10 boards.

Airtable: FREE and Monthly Plans – Available on both Google Play and the Apple Store 

By far, Airtable is one of the best apps out on the market today. Not only is it available for both iPhone and Android devices, but it also syncs to a desktop version. 

Airtable is like Google Sheets and Excel on Acid. 

At the free tier, each “base” can only contain a maximum of 1,200 entries. Which is a ton! You can also have as many “bases” as you’d like. 

In simple terms, a “base” is pretty much a folder. You can have several different sheets in each folder. 

Airtable is amazing to keep track of your home expenses, meal-planning, recipe collection, craft organization, or just about anything you need it for. They even have a ton of templates you can use. All of their templates are fully customizable. I love to use the templates and change everything up. 

The coolest thing is, you can add images to the database! This is perfect if you’re trying to save a recipe and want to see a picture of it.  With Airtable that’s now a reality. 

If you’d like to learn more about Airtable, I would highly recommend you look at it on your laptop or desktop before looking and trying to figure it out on your phone. By clicking any of the images you’ll be directed to Airtable through my referral link.

For transparency, I do receive a “referral” award to use if I ever decide to upgrade. I’ve been using Airtable for years, and I don’t ever foresee myself ever having to upgrade. You can go directly to the Airtable website HERE, or find it on Google Play or the Apple Store.

Grocery Shopping List 

OurGroceries: Free (with ads) $9.99 (no ads) Available Google Play and Apple Store 

By far OurGroceries is the best shopping list app around. 

It’s really easy to use and it saves every item you add to the list. What’s great about his app is you can even add little notes to each item to help your honey out if he’s planning on stopping at the grocery store on the way home. 

OurGroceries automatically syncs with all devices. Let’s say you downloaded the app on your Android and your husband has an iPhone, he can download the app and add items to the shopping list while you’re in the store. Each change is instantaneous. 

You can also add recipes to OurGroceries and automatically add the items needed for each recipe to the shopping list. 

If you’d like to have images on your list, you’ll have to go for the premium version. 

Con: Aside from the price which went up to $5 from last year, Our Groceries is a little slimy with regards to purchasing the premium version. Although you can log in with the same login credentials on multiple devices, each device would be required to pay $9.99 to access all the premium features. 

Let’s say you purchased the app on your iPhone and then decided you wanted to start taking your iPad to the grocery store, you’d have to pay $9.99 to upgrade to have it on both devices. 

I took a screenshot of the image above on my iPad. As you can see, there’s an ad placed on the top of the list; however, there are no ads on my Android, as I upgraded to premium on my phone.

See what I mean about them being a little slimy?

OurGroceries is an amazing app and one I would highly recommend. Although I had updated to premium (when it was $4.99), I don’t feel it’s worth it for $9.99. 

Save your money and use the free version. 

Password Keeper 

Last Pass (Free) 

Keeping your passwords secure is one of the most important things we can do. As a homemaker, not only do we pay our household bills online, but on just about every website we visit a password is needed. 

After trying over 40 password apps, I can honestly say LastPass is the best password keeper. 

Not only does LastPass sync between your phone, tablet, and computer, but you also have the added security of enabling a double secure opt-in. 

With LastPass, you can store not only your passwords but your credit card information, bank accounts, health insurance information, and more. 

This becomes truly valuable, for a few reasons. 

Imagine if you lost your wallet or worse yet, it was stolen. Just think how much stress would be reduced by being able to login into your LastPass account, and have all of your important information in one place. 

I don’t know about you, but when my wallet was stolen, I didn’t have a clue as to any of my credit card numbers, I was so stressed out I couldn’t remember what cards I had. 

Peachy Tip: By storing your credit card info in LastPass, you can have your credit card information handy when you’re making an online purchase and don’t want your hubby to see you get your debit and/or credit card from your purse.

A lot of homemakers keep household binders that keep track of passwords, passports, and other important documents, but what happens if you have to evacuate your home at a moment’s notice due to a home fire or tornado? During all the commotion, you may forget to grab your binder, but with LastPass, you can access your information from any device at any time. 

Your turn 

Do you currently use any of these apps to streamline your homemaking, or do you use another one? Share in a comment.

Stay Peachy!