Cleaning your home can be an exhausting task; maintaining it is even more daunting, especially when there are kids and a full-time job to attend to. Good thing Superman isn’t the only person who’s made of steel—parents are too!
If you have been in a love-hate relationship with cleaning
ever since you can remember, you may not be doing it right. To make cleaning easier and more efficient, you need to relearn and the basics.
1. Get Rid of Clutter
No home is ever considered clean if there is clutter everywhere. Cleaning and organization are two peas in a pod as a clean space is usually the result of smart organization. When you delegate a place for everything in your home, there is less room for clutter and garbage.
Before picking up your brooms and mops, zero in on common areas in your home that usually collect junk and clutter, such as closets, the kitchen, the playroom, and the garage. Focus on a single area first before you move on to another. Once you’ve organized one, you can then proceed to clean it.
2. Start Dusting
To efficiently remove dust from surfaces in your home, start doing so in a top-to-bottom, left-to-right manner. This means that windows go first before furniture. For hard-to-reach areas such as your ceiling, you can tie dampened cloths to the ends of mops or brooms to remove cobwebs. To clean your slatted blinds, close them one way and dust one side before doing the other.
Once you’re done cleaning high surfaces, you can then start dusting light fixtures, fans, doors, picture frames, and the rest of your decor. Applying a glass cleaner on microfiber cloth will help avoid streaking when cleaning your frames, TV, computer screens, and other glass surfaces.
3. Clean Your Floors
Before whipping out your vacuum cleaner, make sure that the compartment isn’t full yet. Then start cleaning the floors of your entire home, and include upholstered furniture. You’ll be surprised at the myriad of lost things that you can find underneath your couch cushions!
Once you’ve vacuumed or swept your floors, it’s time to mop! When mopping, make sure to start from the farthest side of the room, moving toward the entrance. Rinse your mop every time you complete an approximate area measuring four by four feet.
4. Create an Organized Kitchen
Following the basic rule of cleaning, start from the top in your kitchen. Dust the ceiling, vents, and light fixtures first before cleaning the walls. If you are cleaning a newly bought home, your kitchen cabinets can become a mess. Use a mild cleaner for the interior of your cabinets and to refresh its paint.
When cleaning kitchen counters, make sure to remove any debris between the cracks with the help of a putty knife. Put your mild cleaner to good use again in cleaning backsplashes. Using a combination of baking soda and water should also do the trick.
5. Make Your Bathroom Sparkle
The bathroom is one of the most used and abused rooms of the house, so it best deserves to be cleaned regularly. Otherwise, it will become a breeding ground of mold, germs, and mildew. You can prevent this from happening by wiping down your shower walls and floor after each wash. Also make it a habit to open the shower doors and allow air to circulate in the room.
Once you’ve cleaned your shower and macerating toilet, you can then get on with cleaning your floors from soap scum, which can be stubborn and difficult to remove. Consider making a concoction of four parts of mineral oil to one part of warm water, and use this when scrubbing your bathroom floors.
When you know what to do and how to do it efficiently, cleaning your house shouldn’t feel like a tenuous process after all!
