How to keep your house clean: 7 easy tips for a neat and organized home
Maintaining a clean and tidy house can be difficult and overwhelming – there’s no doubt about that! These cleaning tips will show you how to keep your house clean and simplify everything you need to know about keeping up with a clean home.
Organize your home
When everything in your home has a place, it’s less likely for items and things around the house to lay around in no man’s land. The secret is to find a specific spot for every single item somewhere in your home.
When you’re organized, you know exactly where each belonging goes. This eliminates any clutter or build up of “stuff” accumulating in your house.
Read more: 5 Organizing Mistakes that Make Your House Look Messy
The secret is to find a specific spot for every single item somewhere in your home.
Declutter
More things, more problems.
In order to keep your home tidy, be sure to declutter on the regular. At a minimum, try doing a purge twice a year (once in the spring, and once in the fall). This helps you keep your home clear of any unwanted or unused items that are just taking up space.
A few key areas of your house you want to declutter are your:
- kitchen
- closet & clothing / accessories
- garage
- storage space (basement or shed, for example)
- books and toys
If you feel guilty about getting rid of things you barely use, don’t use that as a reason to keep them! Donate these unused items and give someone in need the opportunity to use it instead.
Make your bed
Making your bed every morning sets the tone for the day. Though it might seem redundant to make your bed when you’re just going to jump back into it that night, making your bed makes your home look cleaner instantly.
In just a matter of minutes, you set the tone for the day when you start off by making your bed. It’s one of those cleaning habits that take minimal effort but make the world of a difference.
If you’re someone who really can’t stand the thought of making your bed daily, try minimizing the number of sheets and pillows you have on your bed. Keep it simple and maintainable.
Clean as you cook
After a long time spent cooking in the kitchen, there’s nothing more overwhelming than seeing the pile of dirty dishes that are left for you to do.
Get into the habit of cleaning as you cook to keep the dish washing more manageable and the kitchen more clean.
If you’re waiting for something to boil, use that as an opportunity to wash a few dishes. If you’ve got food in the oven, take that time to wipe down the counters for clean surfaces.
Need more help? Involve your family members to help delegate and split the work. Cleaning as you go saves you a ton of time and helps you avoid that messy kitchen we all dread!
Do a nightly 10 minute clean
Every night, before you go to bed, set a timer for just 10 minutes and do a quick tidy up. This nightly, 10 minute clean is just enough to help you clear the space and wake up the next morning to a clean home.
The 10 minute clean isn’t intended to be a deep clean where you’re taking out all of your cleaning supplies and cleaning products ready to clean hard. Instead, think of it as a quick gloss over to make sure everything is put away for that evening.
That might include clearing the coffee table, putting things back where they belong in the living room, making sure there are no dirty dishes in the sink, etc.
The key here is to stick to that 10 minute timer. Once the time is up, so is the cleaning. Ah, quick and efficient!
Create a cleaning schedule
Having a sustainable cleaning routine all comes down to creating a cleaning schedule that you can stick to.
Create a daily, weekly, and monthly cleaning schedule. What tasks need to be done during each period?
For example, your daily cleaning routine might include: making your bed, doing the dishes, the 10 minute clean up, and a wipe down of the kitchen surfaces.
Your weekly cleaning schedule may include a load of laundry, vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms, and changing out the sheets.
Your monthly cleaning schedule may include decluttering, drawer re-organization, garage clean up, and more.
Implement the one minute rule
The one minute rule is a time management hack that can go a long way in the cleaning world. Here’s how it works: if anything can be done in under one minute, don’t procrastinate on it, don’t put it on your to do list. Don’t leave it for later. Just do it. And do it right away.
Doing this is the simplest and most effective way on how to keep your house clean. This avoids the build up of tasks at the end of the day or at the end of the week that now take an hour to do cumulatively, versus a bunch of things that could’ve been done in seconds.
A few examples of this:
- putting a dish right into the dishwasher instead of keeping it on the counter,
- putting your dirty clothes right into the hamper instead of on the floor,
- throwing out any garbage or old scraps instead of keeping them on your table, or
- doing a single dish several times a day instead of filling the sink up with dirty dishes.
You can do short and simple tasks like this mindlessly with little effort.
How to keep your house clean: take it one step at a time
Maintaining a clean home may seem daunting, but with a few simple cleaning tips like this you’ll go from a messy house to a tidy house in just a matter of time. Clean home, clear space, clear mind.
