The WoW Style

With so many of us now working from home, we’re stuck living with our mess 24/7. This means that, for the first time, we have to reckon with how little effort we put in to maintain a clean home. And in the midst of a global pandemic, keeping your house clean and disinfected should be priority one.

However, it’s easy to muster up the motivation for a one and done burst of Spring Cleaning. It’s harder to figure out how to keep your house clean in the long term. No worries! Our helpful guide will show you some tips and tricks to help you clean each room of your house and keep them clean for the long run.

How to Keep Your House Clean, Room by Room

Every single room in your household has different cleaning requirements, and will require different types of maintenance. So, to simplify, we’ve broken down how to keep your house clean by room. This way, you can skip to the areas of your home that you know will need the most attention.

Cleaning the Living Room and Keeping It Clean

What makes a shared living space look disgusting? It’s less any actual stains or dirt, and more the clutter. Think about it: Kids play video games in there, your mail likely gets put on a random table, toys get left out, shoes and clothes go everywhere, and all the while, those books you bought but never read draw dust and bugs like a magnet while taking up valuable shelf space.

It’s too much! So, let’s break it down. Here’s how you can clean your living room, and keep it clean for good:

Organization Is Your Friend

“A place for everything, and everything in its place” is more than an old saying when it comes to keeping your house clean. It’s a way of life. If you have a designated space for everything in the living room, it makes things look far less cluttered, which attracts less dust. (You’ll also find that you have more floor and shelf space than you thought once you get started!)

Break Out the Daily Dust Buster

If you just groaned at the idea of dusting every single day, we get it. It’s not a fun prospect. However, your electronics attract dust constantly throughout the day, which isn’t healthy for them or for you. So, grab your microfiber dust cloth, an electrostatic cleaner, and get to wiping.

Chances are, it won’t take nearly as long to dust all the electronics in the living room as it would if you had waited for them to grow a coat of dust bunnies. While you’re at it, grab the eponymous dust buster or vacuum cleaner and attachment about once a week and run that over your couch and other seats. You’ll be surprised how much nicer your home looks without all that gross dust and dead skin on top of everything!

Sort and Shred All That Mail

When so much of what we receive these days is email, most snail mail is junk advertisement or really old-fashioned bills. However, it’s not a great idea to let all of this pile up. Not only does it look messy, it can leave your personal information exposed if your home were to get broken in to.

This is why it’s important to sort your mail as soon as you receive it, and shred anything with personal information on it as soon as possible. That can help protect you from identity theft as well as keep your living room neat and tidy!

Cleaning the Bathrooms and Keeping Them Clean

Your bathrooms are among the most germ-y rooms in your home, so keeping them clean regularly is crucial. With so much moisture and many bacterial breeding grounds, it can be hard to stay on top of them. However, these tips should help you clean house around your porcelain thrones:

Daily Disinfecting

Keeping a stash of disinfectant wipes around is a good practice in both the bathroom and the kitchen (more on that later). Conducting a quick wipe down of commonly used surfaces like the toilet seat, bathroom counter, and sink and shower fixtures can help prevent build-up and reduce cleaning time later.

Grab a Squeegee

This may seem a bit odd, but trust us, it’s a lifesaver. If you have a squeegee in the shower that everyone uses once they’re done, it can absorb and wipe away excess moisture. That, combined with spritzing your shower walls with some kind of water repellant, can stop soap scum and hard water stain buildup in their tracks. This will make your life easier when you go to clean it later.

Ditch Those Soap Bars

We get it; bar soap is infinitely cheaper than liquid soap or detergent. Here’s the thing, though: that bar of soap is a repulsive germ magnet, and it leaves a ring of nastiness and soap scum where it sits on your sink or in your shower. You’re better served using containers of liquid soap over the bars, both for your health and your cleaning sanity.

How to Clean and Maintain Cleanliness In Your Kitchen

Cleaning a kitchen and keeping it clean is where you can pull from the experts: restaurant owners. Those working in the culinary industry have a wealth of tips to help you keep your cooking spaces neat and tidy.

If You Use It, Clean It As You Go

This is the simplest tool for staying on top of your dirty dishes, and a trick used by every single chef known to man. Restaurants fill up with loads of dirty dishes, so how do they keep on top of it? By cleaning each dish after it’s used.

Cooking is all about time management. Unless you’re cooking something incredibly finicky, you don’t have to tend your pans every second. And if you have something in the oven, so much the better. Use that time while something else is cooking to clean the dishes you used for preparation and wipe down your kitchen counters. 

Date and Label Your Containers

Your refrigerator can become a breeding ground for bacteria overnight, especially if you don’t have your leftovers properly contained. We’ve all had the experience of putting something in the fridge, forgetting it’s there, then cleaning it out months later when it’s covered in mold.

By labeling and dating your food containers when you put them in the refrigerator, you can keep track of what you have and when you need to use it. This cuts down on your fridge cleaning time and the amount of food waste you have.

Cleaning Out the Closet and Helping It Stick

Organization is the name of the game when it comes to cleaning out the closet. Your bedroom and hall closet should be for two things: clothes and shoes. However, many of us use them as throwaway, catch-all storage spaces.

That’s fine, but the same principle as in the living room applies here: A place for everything, and everything in its place. Keep track of your belongings with storage bins to keep your closet from becoming an avalanche of possessions when you open it up.

Fun Cleaning and Maintenance Tips for Kids’ Bedrooms

Getting your kids to keep their rooms clean is hard. Cleaning is not the most fun chore to do, and making the bed seems pointless to many children. So, how do you incentivize them to do the work?

Punishment should not be your go-to strategy. A threat of punishment may frighten your kids into doing their chores, but it doesn’t instill the value of the work in them for the rest of their life.

If you feel that rewarding them for basic responsibilities sends the wrong message, then you need to find ways to make cleaning fun for them. Perhaps by turning the chore into a game or a competition, you can make the otherwise boring task something fun for the whole family.

Cleaning and Maintaining the Master Bedroom

Cleaning the master bedroom requires the use of both bathroom and bedroom cleaning techniques. However, we have a few suggestions that are specific to this combination of rooms:

Control the Humidity

Many master bedrooms with en suite bathrooms struggle with mildew or mold in one or both rooms due to poor humidity control. By investing in a dehumidifier, you can save yourself tons of time in cleaning hours and potentially hundreds of dollars in repair bills.

Make Your Bed

We know, we sound like your mother when we say this. However, making your bed each day sends a signal to your brain that you just cleaned this area, and therefore, should do what you can to keep it that way. It also makes the space look and feel less messy and more put-together.

Dressers Aren’t Catch-All Surfaces

We’ve said it a hundred times before, and we’ll say it again: A place for everything, and everything in its place. It’s easy to leave things strewn about on the top of your dresser, especially if you use an attached mirror to help get yourself ready. However, if you have bins or containers to place commonly used items in, you can keep your dresser looking spic and span.

Laundry Room Hacks

If ever there was a chore you could describe as Sisyphean, it’s laundry. No matter how much laundry you do in a given week, it always feels like there’s more that needs to be done. However, we have some hacks below that will help you stop cutting heads off of the laundry room hydra and tame the beast for good.

Divided Bins Are Your Ally

Whether you live alone or with a family, divided laundry bins and multiple baskets are your best friend in terms of taming the laundry room. They let you organize clothes by color, type, owner, or soil level. Whichever system you want to use, so long as the whole house knows about it, you won’t have to pry dirty laundry off the floor and guess about which load it should go into.

Wipe Down Shelves and Surfaces

Unless you have the money to use only laundry pods (and boy, do we envy you if you do!), you’ll have to deal with splashes of sticky detergent drying on your shelves and appliances. These can be hard to wipe off at a later date, so we recommend wiping them down as soon as you see them form. This will also help prevent dust and other grime build-up on the front and sides of your washer and dryer.

Schedule Your Laundry Day

Consistency is key to keeping your house clean. If you schedule your laundry day for the same time every week and do it without fail, you won’t wind up with a month’s worth of laundry piled all over your floor.

What to Do If You Feel Overwhelmed

Now that you have some ideas on how to keep your house clean, you’re probably thinking that it sounds like too much effort. Especially if you have a job and kids. It sounds like a lot, but when you start taking a few minutes to do it each day, it’s not that much.

However, if you truly feel overwhelmed, there is no shame in hiring a company like The Cleaning Advantage to help you take care of your household cleaning. It’s a lot to keep track of, and these companies are here to help you keep your head on straight while you balance work and home life.

Keeping Your House Clean, Reviewed

It can be difficult to figure out how to keep your house clean, especially when you don’t live alone. However, if you establish a routine, put everything in its proper place, and stay consistent about conducting small-scale cleanings each day, you’ll have no problems cleaning your home.

If you found this article about cleaning your house and keeping it clean informative, and would like to read more like it, check out the Home Improvement section of our blog for more content like this!