About — Retro Modern Mom

I'm June Halvorsen — mom of a five-year-old and a two-year-old, wife of a patient man, and keeper of a 1950s ranch house we are slowly un-renovating back to its original cheerful self. On the kitchen counter sits the object this whole site is named for: my grandmother's tin card file, a battered little box of hand-typed household routines — wash day, zone weeks, the Saturday catch-up, a from-scratch cleaner for nearly everything.

Before this house, I was an operations coordinator, which means I cannot leave a system alone. So that's what Retro Modern Mom is: every method in the card file — and the best of the ones I find elsewhere — gets tested in a real house with real children, timed, and then either rebuilt for modern machines and modern schedules or respectfully retired. The site's house rule sits on the front of the box: if it doesn't survive a Tuesday with a toddler, it doesn't go in the card file.

Here's how the file is organized: cleaning rhythms for the day-per-task schedules and 15-minute habits (start with the weekly cleaning schedule — it's the spine of everything else), old-fashioned methods for the vinegar-and-castile side of things, organizing with kids for toys, closets and nurseries, laundry & linens for wash-day and the linen closet, and resets & seasons for the Sunday reset and the big seasonal cleans.

What you won't find: nostalgia for its own sake, opinions about what anyone's home "should" be, or made-up numbers. The retro angle here is provenance, not politics — these methods survive because they work, and when one doesn't, I say so.

One honest housekeeping note about the name on the door: retromodernmom.com was an Orange County mom blog from 2011 to 2017, sat abandoned and was misused by spammers for a stretch after that, and was relaunched from scratch in 2026 by new writers — everything here is new work under new stewardship.

A note on affiliate links: some posts contain affiliate links — if you buy through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things that have earned a place in this actual house.