Alte FriedmanEveryone agrees that cleaning is necessary, and a well-maintained home is essential. But for many full-time working parents, finding time to clean their house thoroughly can be challenging, especially during workdays and school days. Thank goodness, there’s the weekend to do all your chores. Still, it would be great to spend your rest days actually resting rather than doing more work.
While a chore-free weekend may be out of reach, for now, you can lessen your load with these quick cleaning hacks you can do every day.
Make Your Bed Every Morning
Maintaining a clean home begins with developing good habits, like making the bed as soon as you get up. The bed is the centerpiece of your bedroom (hence the name), so when it’s messy, your room will look disorganized.
Take a few minutes every morning to straighten out your sheets and pillows. You’ll feel more awake and ready to start your day after doing so. After a long day, you’ll be thanking your “morning self” for the small favor.
Teaching your kids to make their beds in the morning after they get up is one way to instill discipline and good cleaning habits.
If you’re not convinced yet, here are more reasons to make your bed every morning.
Don’t Leave It for Later
A cluttered home doesn’t happen overnight—the books you didn’t return to their shelves, the toys the kids left on the floor, the trash you forgot to toss in the bin. All these little messes accumulate and turn into one giant mess that you can no longer ignore.
Start a habit of returning things after you’re done with them, and pick up after yourself all the time. If everyone (including the children) cleans up after themselves, your home will be a much tidier and better place to inhabit. Plus, you won’t have to face the daunting task of cleaning a catastrophically cluttered house later.
Sure, it may be difficult in the beginning, but cleaning and decluttering will become more automatic as time goes on.
Another thing you can do to prevent clutter from collecting is to take 15 minutes a day to declutter your home. Prepare a garbage bag, set up a timer, and do a quick cleaning of your home. You can do the following within the 15-minute time frame:
- Pick up toys and put them back into their container (with the kids’ help)
- Toss out trash into the bag
- Throw your dirty clothes into the laundry basket
- Straighten up your throw pillows
- Return books in their shelves
To maximize your time, only tackle messes that take three minutes or less to do. Leave out time-consuming chores, like vacuuming or scrubbing stains, for when you have more time to clean.
Have a Place for Everything
Lack of proper storage space is one common cause of accumulated clutter. You need drawers for utensils and trinkets, closets for clothes and essentials, and shelves for books and whatnot. If you don’t want your stuff lying around the house, prepare organizers, containers, and storage space for them.
You can use dividers to organize the items inside your cabinets and drawers. When people are in a hurry, they tend to randomly chuck items inside organizers. By the time you notice what you’re doing, your drawer has been overloaded by a pile of random stuff. You’re more likely to keep your cabinets and drawers in order and utilize the space more efficiently when you use dividers.
Everyone in the family must know where everything belongs; otherwise, there won’t be much order in your organizers. It helps to put labels on containers and organizers to let everyone know where each item belongs. Making the labels can be a fun family activity.
Air Out the Bathroom
Moisture can lead to severe property damage, and the bathroom has plenty of it. Aside from leaving stubborn watermarks, leftover moisture can cause the development of mold and mildew, which are harmful not only to your property but also to your and your family’s health.
However, there’s an easy way to prevent mold and mildew from growing in your bathroom: airing out the room periodically. Always have the exhaust fan on when you’re taking a shower or bath for better air circulation. Then, after your bath, leave the fan on for about 10 to 15 minutes to help the bathroom room dry faster.
You can hasten the drying process by using a squeegee or towel to remove condensation on your shower doors, mirrors, and bathroom surfaces.
Another way to prevent the occurrence of mold growth and mildew in the bathroom is to consider a dehumidifier.
Prevent Plumbing Problems
Plumbing problems are harbingers of disastrous messes. If you don’t want to deal with flooding, blistering paint, and water stains, prevent these problems by protecting your plumbing system.
Insulate your pipes to keep them from freezing during the cold months and to keep them from rusting. Frozen pipes and rusty ones crack and burst more easily, causing a major leak and flooding. Then, you’ll need to pay a considerable sum to get them replaced.
If you’re using an old toilet, you may want to get one that’s more up-to-date, especially if yours has needed repairs more frequently. Consider investing in an upflush toilet with a macerating motor, which uses less water per flush and helps prevent clogs. An upflush toilet also takes less work to install, compared to standard ones.
You may also want to update your showerheads and faucets to low-flow models to save more water and money.
Start doing monthly maintenance checks all over your home. This way, you can catch problems before they get worse, replace things that aren’t working, and keep your home in top form if a problem arises by reaching out to an experienced plumber.
