Sometimes it seems like the only way to get your home really clean would be to hire a maid service. Homes start out clean the day you move into them, but time and day-to-day life create dirt the eyes can see and debris you can’t see that hides in nooks, crannies, and ventilation shafts. How do you get your home truly clean without spending every waking moment on cleaning? Read on to find that out.
Kitchen
Getting your kitchen really clean starts with deep cleaning the items that collect dirt and grime invisibly. Contact grease trap cleaners in your area to have them empty your home’s grease trap. This area of a kitchen most people do not see, but in homes, as in restaurants, it takes the brunt of kitchen grease. If this area overflows, you end up with cooking oil and grease covering your floor.
Another item to vigilantly maintain to keep a really clean home also resides in the kitchen. The sinks in the kitchen, especially those with a trash compactor or food compactor, need deep cleaning, such as rooting their pipes at least annually. Help keep them running well by using them only when necessary.
Keep counters clean by placing a package of bleach wipes on the counter. As soon as a spill or splatter happens, grab a wipe and clean it up, sanitizing the counter in the process. Stop crumbs and other small debris from falling between the stove and counter by installing a liner over the crevice.
Sweep the floors once a day. Use a Swiffer-style broom to gather the dirt and debris onto the cleaning cloth. Drop the cleaning cloth in the trash and enjoy a clean floor.
Rinse dishes after use and place them in the dishwasher. At the end of the day, run the dishwasher. You wake up to clean dishes and all the dishes stay clean.
Living Room
If only keeping your home really clean could become as ditching e waste. With a computer file, you drop it in the recycle bin, click delete, and it disappears. Place an aesthetically pleasing trash bin in the living room to provide a spot to throw away papers, food wrappers, etc. A metal waste basket complements most interiors and offers enough room for a few days’ worth of small refuse. Vacuuming carpets and rugs gets them clean looking fast, but once every three months or so, take the carpets outside and beat them while hanging from a deck railing or a clothesline. This airs them out and causes deeply ingrained debris to fall out.
Children’s Bedrooms
Keeping a child’s room really clean doesn’t take a lot of work. After you send them off to private or public school, speed-clean their room by picking up strewn clothing and dropping it into the hamper. Place toys in a toy chest.
That speed cleaning readies the room for vacuuming or sweeping. Use a Swiffer-style broom or mop to quickly clean the floor of a non-carpeted room. Use a bleach wipe to clean the dresser top, nightstand, and desk. Wipe down the chair seat, too.
Laundry Room
To keep the laundry room really clean, place a large trash can between the washer and dryer. Toss lint from the dryer and old dryer sheets in it. It also provides a place for the random things pulled out of jeans or other pants pockets.
Install a mobile clothes rack in the room to hang dresses, t shirt apparel with beads or other embellishments, and other items that should not go in the dryer. This offers them an ideal location for hanging to dry. A rack on rollers makes it easier to transport the clothing to put them away when dry.
Install a shelf on the wall for laundry detergent, bleach, and dryer sheets. Designate an area for stacking laundry baskets or purchase a hamper with separate sections for whites, colors, and jeans/dark-colored pants. This prepares them for going into the washer without requiring sorting. Teach children to sort their own laundry using one of these hampers with separate areas.
Bathroom
Do you find funky things when cleaning your bathroom, like your teen’s invisible braces? Make it easier for them to notice this type of item by installing a sink and toilet in a color like peach or blue. A white basin makes it tough to notice something clear setting on it, but a pastel color sets the clear item apart and makes it easier to see.
Install shelves on either side of the mirror over the sink. Provide each family member with their own bin or basket marked with their name, so they have a place for their own items. This helps keep the bathroom really clean by providing a private place for everything.
Scrub the bathtub with bleach cleaner. Avoid abrasives since these can damage the porcelain finish. Use the same cleaner on the sink and outside of the toilet. Wiping them down quickly once per day after everyone leaves the house keeps it clean and sanitized.
Install a toilet bowl cleaner device in the toilet tank. This automatically cleans your toilet bowl and sanitizes it when the toilet gets flushed. Talk about an easy way to clean your toilet!
Basement
Perhaps you don’t associate HVAC with basements, but extending your home’s heat and air service to the basement can help keep your home really clean and safer. How, you ask? Basements top the list of places in a home where mold and mildew can develop. When you extend the HVAC to the basement, it reduces humidity in the area. That removes a key ingredient needed for dangerous mold development.
If you clean the basement and spot mildew or mold, act quickly to eliminate it. Bleach the area and scrub it clean. Check the area around it for water damage and if you find signs of mold growth inside the walls, call a mold abatement service.
Bleach the floors, especially if they’re concrete. Consider adding a sealant or epoxy to the floors in the basement to protect them from damage and help them remain cleaner. Applying this type of floor sealer also creates a pleasing aesthetic since the epoxy gleams and creates a mirror-like finish. Since cement walls draw cold and prove tough to clean, cover them with wallpaper or wallboard. Either option provides you with an easy-to-clean surface that you can wipe clean.
Storage Room
Keep your storage room clean and well organized by using organizers and shelving to separate items and keep them orderly. Choose bins with lids, so you don’t have to dust things when you take them out of the box for use. Use safes to corral important papers and keep them locked away for when you need to present them to the bank or insurance company. Clean the floor once a week in this little used room. Vacuum if it’s carpeted, sweep if it features wood, tile, or cement floors.
Garage
Keeping a home really clean requires cleaning the garage, too. This means getting rid of most of what you keep in it because, let’s face it, if you store it in your garage, you probably don’t use it often. Sort the items in the garage so you can toss the ones that you can donate, donate what you can, and keep only what you need.
Have an organization like the Salvation Army pick up the items you want to donate or drop them off at their collection spot. Reorganize the items you will keep, such as holiday decorations and your kids’ bikes. The rest of it goes in the trash can to get hauled to the landfill.
Install wall shelves or ceiling storage to place the lidded bins out of the way. This keeps the floor clean and easy to navigate. Speaking of the floor, if it still consists of masonry cement, have a sealant or epoxy added to it to create a better-looking floor that’s easier to clean.
Sweep out the garage once per week. Use a Swiffer-style wet mop to clean it effectively and quickly. Keep a package of bleach wipes handy to wipe down the workshop space or laundry area, if the garage includes these.
Home Studio
Some people refer to a home studio as a home workshop. By either name, it may house a circular saw lubricant system or wrenches and a band saw. Perhaps yours houses a woodworking workshop. To help keep this area really clean, install an air-cleaning system.
This type of system, available at most major home improvement stores, offers a way to automatically remove construction dust, sawdust, and much more to keep the air you breathe clean while you work. Simply turn on the air filtration system when you enter the workshop and do your work, while the filter does its.
Once a week, sweep the floors. Also, wipe down the work areas with bleach wipes to sanitize them and clean off the bits of debris that come from cutting wood and metal. Every few months, run a broom around the corners of the walls at the ceiling to remove spider webs.
Home Office
Really clean your home office quickly and easily by vacuuming it once per week. Keep bleach wipes handy in this room, too. Hide a small packet of them in a drawer on your desk. It’s easier to clean if you already have what you need in place. Buy a multi-pack of these wipes and place a package in each room. Wipe down the desk, bookshelves, and file cabinets. This dusts them and sanitizes them.
Use file trays and a desktop folder organizer to keep items you need to reach frequently handy. Place a desk organizer inside the main desk drawer to corral items and make paperclips and USB drives easy to find. This keeps them from sliding around and falling out the back of the drawer onto the floor. Grab the handheld vacuum you use to detail your vehicle and use it to clean the small electronic enclosures that surround your desktop computer. Corral the cords on the computer with a maintainer that lets you tag each cord with a name to make it easy to identify the right one.
General Quick, Deep Cleaning Tips
Some items require more than a quick cleaning each week. Although that keeps the home looking clean, once per year, conduct a spring cleaning day. On this day, clean the exterior of the windows and power wash the house.
Once per year, deep clean your carpets by hiring a carpet cleaning service or a steam cleaner. Steam cleaning can lift our smells and help restore the vibrant colors the carpet or rug had when first purchased. Ask the cleaning service about sealants they can add to the carpet once it dries to help it remain cleaner and resist dirt.
Make cleaning walls simpler by using wipe-clean wallpapers or wallboards. Place over drywall, these items provide a surface that you can clean using a bleach wipe. Paint on drywall can require significant scrubbing to remove scuff marks or stains. If you don’t want to paper the area, consider hiding where a table made scuff marks with trim or wainscoting, which only covers a portion of the wall and still shows off your favorite paint.
Keeping a home really clean takes just a few minutes a day. When you place the cleaning items you need throughout the home, always in reach, you make it simpler and quicker to clean. There’s no hauling buckets from one end of the house to another and if you only have a minute or two at the end of the day, then you can grab a wipe and clean quickly.
Organizing your home and belongings makes cleaning easier, too. Using lidded storage lets you wipe off the tops of the lids and keep the surface clean. The lids keep clean what you store inside. With a little organization and the right cleaning products, you can keep a really clean home at all times without much effort.