Mom’s Straightforward Advice on Cleaning a Home

Here are some tips from my Mom on making your house cleaning efforts more practical, efficient, and manageable. There’s some true gems in here – don’t knock Mom’s advice until you try it!

Knock out one room at a time. Cleaning an entire house is pretty intimidating but the key to any task is to break it up into smaller tasks. When approaching a monstrous cleaning project, break it down and knock it out one room at a time. This also makes it easier to delegate cleaning to others – like kids, who should be responsible for cleaning their own rooms, and older kids, who should be able to handle a good bathroom cleaning.

Professional clean your carpets once every 1-2 years. Renting out a carpet cleaner (or paying someone to do it for you) isn’t exactly cheap but man oh man – what a difference it makes! For families with kids or dogs (or kids and dogs!) cleaning the carpets is mandatory! With children and animals, I’d suggest going for it at least once a year, possibly twice. Those households with only adults can get away with doing it about every 2 years.

• Tip: If you rent, see if you can get your apartment complex or landlord to split the cost of rental. Some places maintain professional carpet cleaning equipment that’s used to prepare carpets for a new rental and would be happy to loan the equipment to you free of charge.

Keep usable cleaning supplies handy to make your life easier. If you want other people in the house to clean up after themselves, make it obvious. In my last house we left not one but two different bottles of all purpose kitchen spray cleaner in different parts of the kitchen. Being that 5 of us lived there, there was a lot of kitchen action going on. If we didn’t get in the habit of wiping down the counters after making something, the kitchen would get really dirty, really quick. The psychological effect of having the cleaner always out, present, and available made it much easier to clean up after ourselves – and heck, 3 of us were guys in our 20′s, if that tells you anything!

Organize and Purge along the way. Whenever I go to town cleaning my house, I always get sucked into organizing my things and purging a bunch of rubbish that I’ve collected along the way. This can be a big distraction when cleaning – you don’t want to spend too much time on other things – but at the same time, cleaning is the perfect opportunity to knock out these tasks too.

Author Bio: By Annabelle Sage. Annabelle maintains the Wardrobe Closets shop out of her Washington home. She’s in love with the idea of keeping her home tidy + organized through cleanliness and awesome storage gadgets. To get some ideas on the latter, be sure to visit her blog!