Owning a home is a privilege, and one you work to sustain, but the irony is that the larger the house you live in, the more it takes to maintain. Of course, for many people, the size of their home might imply heightened affluence, which means hiring a regular gardener or cleaner can come as second nature.
In some cases, you may either prefer to clean the home yourself or feel that paying someone is a wasted expense. Either way, it’s important to live in a clean and tidy home if you hope to feel comforted and relaxed there. Often, the state of our surroundings can impact our perspective and mental well-being, which is why a well-kept house is more than just for bragging rights, it can markedly improve your comfort while living there.
It’s also important to mention that while a clean house is a healthy goal to curate, this is a long-form set of practices as opposed to a one-and-done repair. Moreover, you may be investing too much time in keeping your house clean when a few structural changes could limit how often you need to keep up with those tasks, saving you more time in the long run.
In this post, then, we’ll discuss seven marvelous methods for spending less time cleaning your home without having to degrade the quality of its upkeep.
Methods For Spending Less Time Cleaning: Keep A Dependable Schedule
To the extent that you can, curating a cleaning schedule that works for you can vastly outweigh cleaning when you feel like it, or when it’s most needed. This is because a cleaning schedule is already accounted for and can easily be broken up over days or weeks. So, for example, two days a month, you might vacuum your master bedroom and polish it. Once a week, you might clean out your refrigerator, and once every other month, you might defrost it.
A dependable schedule helps maximize your routine, and it also makes you more likely to mentally prepare for a cleaning effort, even if you have a busy day. On top of this, regular cleaning means that your next cleaning task will be less pronounced, thanks to your last efforts to keep the space in good condition. It’s why washing your dishes after every meal is much better than letting the pile build up over time.
Focus On High-Traffic Spaces
Of course, certain areas of your household can go for a longer period without cleaning than others. Your bathroom and kitchen countertops are examples of high-traffic areas where a lot of activity is taking place, and where bacteria can easily grow. As such, you might implement a regular effort of this, such as bleaching your toilet bowl every other day or even disinfecting your kitchen countertop every day after cooking.
Other high-traffic spaces may include bedside tables, beds, anywhere your pet sleeps, your coffee table, and of course, the areas people walk most. If you keep these in good condition first, then the rest can be planned according to your schedule and needs. Of course, that’s not to say areas rarely touched remain clean forever – dust can accrue on your bookshelf without your careful influence, and so finding a balance is essential.
Delegate Chores To Family Members
If you have other people living with you, namely a family, then they should be helping you out with the cleaning. Even if your partner works a full-time job and you’re a stay-at-home parent, they should also hold their share, be that washing the dishes or taking the trash out. Little things like this add up over time and save you plenty of effort.
Of course, when your children grow a little older, they can begin learning how to clean their bedrooms too. This might include remaking their beds, vacuuming, dusting, and reorganizing their laundry where necessary. You have oversight over all of this of course, but at the very least, this saved effort can help you enjoy the best possible living situation.
Organize Your Space & Natural Home Layout
It’s important to organize your space and natural home layout, not only to design your property as you like it (which is the priority here) but also to maximize cleaning efficiency. For example, if you can easily declutter a bookshelf on a side table while you clean, thanks to your pull-out book holders, then that might take a fraction of the time it would otherwise.
Of course, navigable space is important too. Vacuuming your living space with your coffee table placed against one of the side walls will give you more room to fan out and clean the floor. In some ways, improving the natural qualities of your home can help it seem much cleaner than before. For example, if you have the most beautiful and well-presented home interior, but your windows are dirty, then the natural light you could use to bountifully highlight your design effort is impeded. Hiring a cleaner to resolve this issue once and for all is, for obvious reasons, an excellent choice.
Declutter Where You Can
It’s good to declutter the home when you can. That’s not to say you need to follow Feng Shui or make your home look like the most minimalistic display in an IKEA showroom, only that cleaning is so much easier when your home doesn’t feel like an assault course.
Decluttering is really rather simple. You can make less stand out if you place ornaments in notable places, if you regularly tidy up your bookshelves if you keep only a few decorations on the walls, and if you maintain areas well. For example, a shelving spice rack as opposed to many small jars of spice over a side of the countertop keeps your cooking space (or mise en place as many chefs like to call it) as neat as possible before you continue on.
Enjoy Two Deep Cleans (Or More) A Year
There’s nothing quite like a deep clean. But did you know that the spring deep clean, while popular, doesn’t have to tie you to a direct season? Two deep cleans a year, be that one in the autumn and spring, or perhaps two in the summer depending on how busy your house is, can be a wonderful effort.
This way, you can also constantly remove items from the house that you no longer need, and organize through storage spaces (like that drawer filled with everything that people have in their household), sooner rather than later.
It may sound like a real effort to deep clean, but you can always break this up over weeks as discussed above. Moreover, the peace of mind that comes from knowing everything is in its right place, as opposed to little issues nagging at you year-long, can be a great preparation to make.
Methods for spending less time cleaning: A Speed Clean Can Be More Than Enough
We’ve made cleaning sound like some heroic effort, almost as if you were preparing for gladiatorial combat with all the preparation and planning you have to put in. of course, there’s nothing wrong with a quick speed clean either.
That might simply mean disinfecting your bathroom sink after a week or so. It might mean using antibacterial floor wipes to clean your laminate floor after you’ve spilled coffee grounds, which is easy enough to do. If your schedule is hectic and your cleaning is mostly comprised of speed cleaning as and when possible, that’s more than acceptable.
This way, you can avoid making cleaning into a tiresome obligation or even a compulsive obsession, and give yourself a break when you need it. With this advice, you’ll be sure to spend less time cleaning, while still achieving a beautiful and hygienic home.
