Follow these five simple house cleaning tips - they really work!
Don’t make yourself or your family members slaves to your house.
You and your family are the best judges of how often you need to clean your house. The size of your home, the number and ages of family members, whether any of you have environmental allergies, your tolerance for disorder, and many other factors will influence how often you choose to clean. You don’t have to clean everything every day, every week, or even every month. You only need to clean each room and each article as often as is necessary to maintain the kind of environment you want. We found that it was helpful for our entire family to sit down together and discuss this issue.
If you use our house cleaning checklist software, Let’s Clean Up!, you won’t lose track of your cleaning schedule no matter how complicated it is. Let’s Clean Up! is very flexible. It allows you to schedule your cleaning however it works best for you, and it doesn't force you to stick to a rigid schedule. If you decide to skip a scheduled chore, it will just reschedule the chore on your next cleaning day.
Establish a regular cleaning schedule.
It’s easier to keep your house clean if you prevent things from getting really dusty or dirty. When you wait a long time between cleaning sessions, it makes the work much harder. Keep cleaning supplies on hand and readily available. Our house cleaning checklist software, Let’s Clean Up!, makes it simple to maintain your cleaning schedule.
Reduce clutter!
Do you like to display mementos, figurines, or knickknacks around your house? They can beautify and personalize your home, but they also add to your cleaning burden. The more you reduce clutter, the easier it is to keep dust under control.
Control dust.
Regular dusting and vacuuming are the keys to controlling dust in your home. Most people who are allergic to dust are actually allergic to dust mite excrement (yuck!). Dust mites are microscopic bugs that eat the skin flakes found in dust. If you provide dust mites with plenty of food by allowing dust to build up in your home, then they will reproduce quickly. The increased dust mite population in turn produces more and more allergens (and more and more dust mites). It’s an endless cycle. Periodic dust removal does away with not only the "dust", but it reduces the reproducing population of dust mites. If you have allowed a lot of dust to accumulate, you will need to dust and vacuum more frequently at first. Use Let’s Clean Up! to keep to a regular schedule, and after a while you will notice that there’s less and less dust each time you clean. When this happens, you can adjust Let’s Clean Up! to reduce your dusting and vacuuming frequency. In our home, we dust and vacuum each room once each month and there’s very little dust accumulation between cleanings. Regular cleaning is the key!
To remove dust from a room, begin by dusting up high. This allows loose dust to fall onto lower surfaces, giving you a second chance to clean it up when you dust the lower surfaces. Do not stir up the dust or flick it into the air; wipe it off in long strokes if possible and keep it on your dust cloth. We like to use cloth diapers for dusting, and we shake them out frequently outside our house to avoid releasing the dust back into the air inside our home. Dust and remove everything from the top of each horizontal surface, and then dust the surface itself. This is easy to do if you keep clutter to a minimum. When you have wiped down all the horizontal surfaces in the room, finish by vacuuming the floor.
Keep your bathrooms clean the easy way.
To determine how often you need to clean your bathroom sinks, showers, and tubs, observe how long it takes for soap to form a film on the surfaces. It’s much easier to clean these surfaces when the film is thin, so don’t wait until it gets thick. For our family, a two- to three-week cycle works just about right. Set the cycle in Let’s Clean Up!, and you won’t have to think about it again.
Soap scum and hair combine to plug your bathroom drains. If you use a liquid soap instead of bar soap, it will reduce the soap scum problem. Don’t allow hair to go down the drain when you clean your sinks or at other times in between, especially if you have long hair. It’s easy to gather the hair that accumulates in the sinks and on the counter each time you brush your hair, and you’ll find that your sinks will keep running freely almost indefinitely. You can sweep up the hair with your hand, or use a tissue if you’re squeamish. It’s well worth the effort, and your bathrooms will look nicer, too.