Shabby Chic Boho Trying to keep a home clean can feel like a never-ending battle. This can be particularly the case if you have pets shedding hair all over the place or kids putting sticky fingers and crumbs everywhere. It may reach a point where you become overwhelmed and start to lose the battle. But don’t give up the fight! Keeping your home clean may just be a case of changing your battle strategy. By working smarter and not harder, you can make things more manageable. Below are just a few different ways to finally keep on top of home cleaning.
Start with the great declutter
Clutter is a form of mess in itself, but it can also make other cleaning jobs harder. For example, wiping a dining table is easy when there’s nothing on it. When it’s covered in bags or paperwork or clothes, cleaning the table suddenly becomes a much more time-consuming job, because you have to move everything first.
Clutter can also increase stress levels, make it hard to find things, make your home less welcoming to guests, provide homes for spiders and pests, and even be a fire hazard. So, it’s important to keep on top of it.
Consider scheduling a great declutter to finally sort through all the items in your home. Plan to go room by room, starting with the most cluttered rooms and working your way down to the least cluttered rooms (it’s more rewarding to get the worst rooms out of the way). Consider designating different piles: ‘keep’, ‘relocate’ (for items that should be in other rooms), ‘sell’, ‘donate’ and ‘throw away’. By getting multiple people involved and spreading it out over a few weekends, you can be thorough without exhausting yourself. Check out this guide for more decluttering motivation tips.
Invest in the right tools
Having the right tools can help cut your cleaning time in half. That doesn’t mean you need to buy every gadget on the market (you don’t need more clutter!). However, investing in a few quality tools could make a difference. A few recommended options include:
- Microfiber cloths: These actually trap dust instead of just moving it around.
- Extendable dusters: A great option for cleaning hard-to-reach places.
- A high quality vacuum cleaner with different attachments: With the right vacuum cleaner and the right attachments, vacuuming your whole home can be made so much easier.
- Dishwasher: Tired of washing dishes by hand? It could be time to invest in one of these handy appliances.
- Specialist cleaning solutions: There are specialist cleaning solutions out there for mould, limescale, grease and carpet stains. Identify common problems in your home and look for top-rated cleaning solutions that will actually tackle them.
Make some practical home improvements
Some homes are not designed in a way that is easy to clean. Surfaces like carpet, unpolished concrete, tile, matte paint and fabric wallpaper may not be the best choice if you’ve got young kids or pets, as they are high maintenance.
Instead, consider materials that wipe clean easily and integrate these into each room. Home improvements to consider could include:
- Installing laminate or vinyl floors: Say goodbye to finicky floor solutions like carpet and embrace laminate or vinyl.
- Repainting walls with durable finish paints: These paints are easy to scrub marks off (look for paints marketed as ‘washable’).
- Replacing bathroom tiles with acrylic panels: If you’re fed up dealing with grouting, consider switching to acrylic panels in your bathroom that can be easily wiped down with a sponge or cloth.
Choose machine-washable everything
When it comes to fabrics around your home, opt for machine-washable options whenever possible. This could include:
- Sofa slipcovers: Instead of scrubbing down sofas, simply place the slipcover in the washing machine.
- Curtains: Some curtains can be tossed in the washing machine.
- Rugs: You can even buy small rugs that are machine-washable!
Embrace robot technology
We now live in a world where robots exist that can clean your home. The most common example is robot vacuum cleaners. These automatically roll around your home picking debris off the floor. No need to manually vacuum.
There are other specific robots that you can invest in, but they may only be necessary for certain homes. For example, you can buy pool cleaning robots to automate pool cleaning.
Get help from professionals
Got the money to pay for professional home cleaning? Why not look into a maid service in your area? A professional maid can take care of all cleaning for you, saving you the time and effort.
Some people pay maids to come around every week, while others invest in them for one-off occasions like deep cleans once per year or cleans before special occasions when guests may be arriving. You could even hire maids to take over specific jobs that you don’t like such as vacuuming or cleaning the bathroom.
Make sure to spend time comparing different professional services – you’ll find maids at all kinds of rates online, and many will have reviews so that you can get a good idea of how good quality they are.
Create a sustainable routine
Cleaning is a continuous job. It’s therefore important to establish a routine to make sure things don’t slip back to how they were. This needs to be a routine that you can stick by.
One option could be to schedule a specific task for each day of the week. Alternatively, you can set a 30 minute tidy period each day at a specific time when you’re most motivated.
Make sure to get family members involved – if you live in a multi-person household, one person should not be doing all the cleaning. Share duties with a partner if you’re both working. If kids are old enough, you could also consider setting them chores (offering rewards like pocket money could encourage them to keep on top of these chores).
Once or twice per year, it could be worth scheduling a giant deep clean/declutter. Traditionally, spring is the time to do this. However, some people find that autumn is better or that January is a good time.
