The dishes have been washed, the laundry all folded and packed away, and there’s not a speck of dust to be seen… For all of about 15 minutes, and then the process restarts itself. Maintaining a constantly clean and tidy household is, well, difficult, to put it mildly. The job never seems to be truly done and it might often feel like you’re living under piles of dishes and dirty clothes for most of the week.
However, there are ways to make this more manageable. Believe it or not, you can have a tidy home without spending every waking minute scrubbing and packing things away. Here are some tips to help you figure it out.
Keep the Air Clean
Keeping your air clean is the first step to feeling fresh in your living space. Breathing freely and managing dust are important parts of not only cleanliness but your health too.
Air purifiers filter out allergens and particles from the air, making it safer and easier to breathe. Dust is a nuisance that seems to gather just minutes after you’ve finished cleaning up, and it can cause hay fever and other sinus-related issues.
Schedule Deep Cleaning Sessions
Spending hours on end or even entire days at a time just cleaning your home isn’t anybody’s cup of tea (or at least not most people’s). However, taking out some time every couple of months to do a deep cleaning session will make you feel way better about the cleanliness of your home throughout the year.
These sessions should involve big tasks. Cleaning behind furniture, scrubbing in hard-to-reach places and other spring cleaning tasks – all the chores that don’t need to be done regularly. When you’re done, your home will have a fresh, shiny feel to it.
Batch Your Chores
When it comes to more regular chores and tasks, it’s a good idea to batch them together to make things quicker and easier. For example, you could batch together specific rooms or specific tasks.
You might choose to clean the whole bathroom on one day and the whole kitchen on another. Or, you might choose to clean all the floors in the house on one day and choose another day to dust and wipe down all your surfaces.
Grouping tasks together like this will save you time and also save you from feeling like you’re spending your entire weekend cleaning the house.
Use the One-Touch Rule
If things seem to always be lying around your home, building up and creating clutter that drives you crazy, then the one-touch rule can help you to declutter your home and life and keep it that way.
This rule is something that everyone in your household will need to follow for it to be effective. It’s simple – you vow to only touch an item once when you use it which ensures that it will always go straight to where it belongs. If you take off your jacket or shoes, you’re only allowed to do it in one “touch” which means they can’t get left on the sofa or the floor, they have to go straight back into the cupboard.
Create Cleaning Routines
Creating a daily cleaning routine will help you to stay on top of things and ensure that messes don’t pile up. When you do small tasks each day, there’s less of a chance of things becoming unmanageable.
Your daily routine should consist of small tasks that make a large impact on the way your space looks. For example, making your bed, putting your dirty clothes in the wash basket, wiping down kitchen counters after making a meal, washing up the dishes, folding up blankets after using them, packing away shoes, and other similar tasks.
Wash Your Dishes Right Away
A helpful tip is to make sure you wash up your dishes right after using them, as often as possible.
When you do this regularly, there’s no chance for the sink to pile up with dirty dishes and you won’t have to spend an hour of your evening washing, rinsing, drying and packing away. Doing each item as you use it makes the task quick and effortless.
Have a 10 Minute Tidy Habit
Finally, instilling a 10-minute tidy habit in the morning or evening will help you to feel more put together throughout the day.
Set a ten minute timer on your phone before you go to bed (or early in the morning) and use that ten minutes to pick up and put away any clutter that might have been left around the house.
