Do struggle with keeping your house clean? You’re not alone, we’ve all been there! Here are the best daily cleaning tips and tricks to keep your home spotless.
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Before we begin: the power of decluttering
This may be the best cleaning hack there is, because the less stuff you have in your home, the less you have to clean. We’ve all been there, the floors are dirty, but before we can sweep, mop, or vacuum, we have to pick up blankets, toys, books, socks, and who knows what else. It’s frustrating and it makes it hard to get up the motivation to clean the floors. So instead, we turn off the light and leave the room. we think “I’ll do it later when I have more time.”
But wouldn’t it be so much simpler to keep our floors clean if there was never any excess on them, and we could just… sweep? Decluttering is the hardest part of cleaning, but once we clear out our stuff, keeping the house clean is instantly easier.
There are two great ways to declutter when your goal is to effortlessly keep your house clean.
Everything all at once
As you have time, go through one room (bedroom, kitchen) or category (clothes, books) at a time and ruthlessly get rid of anything you can. There are so many methods to accomplish this task, so just pick the method that sounds the best to you and go for it!
A little goes a long way
If you don’t have time to dedicate to a full decluttering, or if you have already simplified your possessions and now you just need some maintenance, declutter daily during your cleaning routine. As you go about tidying your home, constantly be on the lookout for anything that can go. This habit will go a long way to ensuring that you continue to keep a clean home.
1. The first step to an effortlessly clean home: Make the bed
This is probably the cliché of the cleaning world, but for good reason! Making your bed is the EASIEST cleaning hack you can do, and it goes a long way to keeping the rest of your house looking neat and tidy! Not only will making your bed first thing in the morning give you a sense of accomplishment and motivate you to keep cleaning throughout the day, but it will also give you a surface for folding laundry.
If you find that your bed is just too time consuming to make every morning, ask yourself “why?”. Is it because you have so many throw pillows that it just isn’t worth the effort of making the bed everyday?
A made bed doesn’t have to be aesthetic to be functional.
2. Daily cleaning starts with laundry
For some reason, everyone hates doing laundry. Laundry is never ending and it always piles up. But laundry is one of the biggest things that contributes to a messy house. Whether it’s dirty clothes next to the hamper, your husband’s socks next to the couch, the baby’s burp cloths everywhere but where you need one, laundry is everywhere.
One load a day keeps the cleaning overwhelm away
If you can commit to checking your laundry every day – and doing a load, start to finish – you will see a huge improvement in your cleaning checklist. Washing, drying, and folding (immediately) one load of laundry a day will insure that you never have an overwhelming pile up of laundry. This was my preferred method for when we had a washer and dryer.
Alternately, if one load a day doesn’t work for you – maybe you’re like me, and have to leave your home to go to coin laundry – make an effort to pick up any loose laundry you find laying around and make sure that the laundry is sorted into the correct location every day. At the end of the day, I go around the house picking up burp clothes, socks, kitchen towels and wash clothes, and whatever else I can find. I then immediately place everything in the correct laundry basket so that I can do a load during the day without running around and gathering everything up.
3. The kitchen is the heart of the home
Just as with not letting laundry pile up, dishes love to accumulate in the sink and on kitchen counters. Another great way to ensure a clean home is to always do the dishes as soon as they are made and empty the dishwasher as soon as it is done running. This is especially important if you have a tiny kitchen with limited counter space. Not only will the home feel cleaner by doing the dishes immediately, but you will also be more likely to cook.
Additionally, I like to “close” the kitchen down every night by gathering the dirty towels and wash clothes I’ve used that day, and wiping down the counters with Branch Basics. I also make sure all of the food is properly stored, so there are less messes to deal with later.
Drop a comment below if you want to hear more about how I close my kitchen every night!
4. Clearing surface clutter is a must for your daily cleaning checklist
Clutter tends to build up fast on any and all surfaces. The dining table becomes the catch all for literally everything throughout the day, and oddly enough, so do windowsills. Clearing off surfaces and getting rid of visual clutter is key to having your house look tidy. When clearing away surface clutter, ask yourself if the object is something you need to keep or if it should be donated. The less clutter you have, the less you have to care for it.
5. Daily cleaning requires checking the floors
I once heard it said that you should be sweeping/moping once for each person or pet you have in your home every week. So for my family of my husband and I, our son and our dog, we should be cleaning the floors about 4 times per week. Now that may sound like an awful lot of sweeping and vacuuming. It is. But it’s one of those things where the more often you do it, the less cleaning you actually have to do. One sweep will only take 5 minutes instead of 15 because you are starting from a relatively clean place instead of complete chaos.
6. Wiping down all surfaces reduces the grime
After you’ve made a bed or two, folded a load of laundry, cleared of clutter from surfaces, and cleaned those floors, take a quick pass and wipe down all surfaces. This include kitchen and bathroom countertops, but also cupboard doors, the microwave or dishwasher, or whatever other surface around the house that you notice is looking a little grimy.
The bigger picture of keeping your home clean
Now that you have a nice daily checklist for keeping your home clean, you can also pick a few things to do on a weekly rotation. Cleaning out your fridge regularly is a great way to keep your home clean. Washing your bed sheets will keep you feeling fresh. Giving your bathrooms a good scrub always yields happy results.
Figure out some tasks that you would like to do on a weekly schedule (example below), and see how your daily and weekly cleaning routines are transformed.
You may also want to put different rooms in your house on a monthly rotation. This will help with a deep clean of the whole house in one day segments instead of taking a week or two. Simply assign each room you have to a month, and sometime during that month, go through and clean it out!
Customize your daily cleaning checklist to work for you
Below is a downloadable free list to help you keep your home effortlessly clean. The daily cleaning checklist is already filled out for you, but the weekly and monthly portions are completely customizable so you can have the best cleaning routine for your home!
Once again, a little goes a long way, and by keeping up with all of your daily cleaning tasks as you go about your day, you can maintain an (almost) effortlessly clean home.
