A Clean Home Is a Happy Home: 7 Cleaning Tips

We take a lot of pride in our homes. After all, we spend countless hours decorating our houses, setting up our yards, and performing home renovations to expand our space or change the look of our personal castles. But it’s tough to feel happy when you return from work to a messy home! Indeed, a clean home is a happy home, and maintaining it can provide more benefits than you may initially think. 

With that in mind, let’s look at how you can keep your home clean in perpetuity with seven smart cleaning tips.

What Are the Benefits of Maintaining a Clean Home?

There are many reasons to maintain a clean home (aside from the fact that it means you’re less likely to step on something hard and injure your foot).

Less Stress

For one, when you maintain a clean home, you’ll experience less psychological stress. We, humans, love our homes to be neat and clean. If you let your home get dirty and stay that way, it’ll gradually grate on you until you don’t notice the stress pressure built up. But that stress itself can have long-lasting, wide-reaching negative health effects. You might find yourself more tired than usual, having less patience when dealing with challenges or annoyances, and more.

Bottom line: if you want to come home and destress after a long day at work, you’ll need to make sure your home is a clean and comfortable place when you get there.

Health Improvements

In addition, maintaining a clean home can lead to health improvements. For example, if you let dust clutter up your house and collect over time, you might breathe in that dust. While a bit of dust won’t hurt, too much dust can cause respiratory issues or allergic reactions. This is doubly true if you let your house get dirty enough that mold starts to grow in the kitchen or in the corners of rooms. Given the mental and physical health benefits, there’s no reason not to take up some healthy home cleaning habits ASAP!

How Can I Clean My Home – And Keep It That Way?

Let’s face it; many of us want to clean our homes, but it’s tough to build this positive habit from scratch. Let’s break down how you can initially clean your home and keep it clean over the long term by practicing good habits and taking advantage of a few clever tips.

Clean One Room Per Day

Cleaning your whole house or apartment can seem daunting. So don’t!

Instead, make it your mission to clean one room per day of the week. For example, you can clean your kitchen on Monday, your bathroom on Tuesday, and your living room on Wednesday. Assign one room to each day of the week, and soon enough, you’ll have a cleaning routine that should serve you well long term. These cleaning sessions don’t have to be particularly deep. In fact, they shouldn’t be! For example, if it’s time for you to clean your living room, pick up any toys or knick-knacks, straighten the pillows, and dust the entertainment center.

Prioritize the Kitchen and Bathroom

That said, be sure to prioritize your kitchen and bathroom ahead of the other rooms if possible. These two rooms collect more bacteria and germs than the others combined (for obvious reasons). Make sure to clean these rooms once per week at a bare minimum, even if you have to skip other rooms like your bedroom or the living room. A clean kitchen and bathroom work wonders for your physical health and mental stress levels.

Deep Clean Once a Week

While you should surface-level clean each room weekly, you should have a deep cleaning session weekly. The deep cleaning session can take place on a weekend or any other time that works for your schedule.

Deep cleaning means:

• Thoroughly dusting all dusty surfaces
• Wiping down screens and glass surfaces
• Cleaning your oven and getting rid of food grit that builds up over the week
• Deep cleaning the bathroom, such as wiping down the toilet

A deep cleaning session ensures that your home is actually clean rather than just mess-free.

Use Fresh Cleaning Materials

Don’t try to wipe down your kitchen counters with a dirty sponge you’ve used for a month. Be sure to pick up fresh cleaning materials, like sponges, rags, and towels, and use them regularly.

Make Your Own Cleaning Liquids

Did you know you can make cleaning a bit easier – plus save yourself from being exposed to potentially toxic chemicals – if you make your own cleaning liquids? It’s easier than you think! For example, you can decalcify your teapot or coffee pot by mixing a little vinegar and water. Alternatively, you can remove stains on your faucet and other steel surfaces by making a lemon juice and salt mixture and scrubbing the stains with a washcloth or sponge.

Want a few other good cleaning tips to get the job done without buying harsh chemicals or disposable scrubs?

• Use baking soda to clean your couch. Baking soda is ultra-absorbent, so it can get rid of lingering smells on your couch, on the carpet, and on any other cloth surfaces.
• Use Coca-Cola to get rid of even tougher stains. That’s because it contains carbonic and phosphoric acid, which make it great for cleaning away stains.
• Get rid of sink stains and bathtub stains using a salt and grapefruit mixture.
• Clean many screens in your home using coffee filters. Coffee filters are superior since they don’t have any of the fibers left behind by typical washcloths.
• Clean silver and jewelry using baking soda and aluminum foil, neither of which will scratch the jewelry or silver items in question

Remember Your Dishwasher!

Your dishwasher needs to be cleaned, to be sure. But you should also remember that it can be a valuable cleaning tool in and of itself!

For example, you can wash any glass, plastic, or ceramic objects in your house in your dishwasher for a very deep, hot clean. You don’t have to use a rag or sponge at all. Glass light fixtures, flip-flops, toothbrush holders, toy Legos, and many other things can be put in your dishwasher and cleaned hands-free. Remember, you don’t need to worry about your dishes becoming dirty as a side effect. Your dishwasher’s interior becomes quite hot, and if you add a soap pod for dishwashing liquid, you can rest assured any germs that do get inside will perish.

“Reset” Your Home Before Bed

Last but not least, try to reset your home before you go to bed each night. Take a quick walk throughout your house and:

• Pick up any objects that might have fallen, like dog toys or kids’ toys
• Straighten the pillows and blankets on your bed and couch
• Remember to start the dishwasher before going to sleep
• Make sure the sink is devoid of dishes and food

Doing all this ensures you’ll wake up to a relatively clean home and can go about your day without stepping on a Lego or awakening to a pile of dishes in the sink that you forgot to clean after dinner. In other words, resetting your house before bed can help you start the day with the right attitude and energy!

Clean Your Way to a Happy Home

Keeping your home clean is easier than you might think! If you practice the above tips and maintain positive habits for a few weeks, your home will look better than ever in no time – and it won’t take a ton of mental effort to keep it that way.

1AND1 Life can help you go even further and become 1% better daily. With our health guides, wellness tips, and more, we’re the perfect resource for energizing your world and helping you make the most of life. 

Sources:

Effectiveness of a ‘Workshop on Decluttering and Organising’ programme for teens and middle-aged adults with difficulty decluttering: a study protocol of an open-label, randomised, parallel-group, superiority trial in Japan – PMC | NCBI

Dust | NCHH

The dirtiest room in your house is not your bathroom | Business Insider