Keeping your home beautiful is a time-consuming thing. With work, families and the rush of day to day responsibilities, sometimes keeping on top of the cleaning schedule to the standard you would ideally like is nearly impossible, and if you can’t rely on some external help from cleaning services then keeping that pristine living room or gleaming luxury bathroom is going to be a lot harder.
Thankfully, there are some tips and tricks that you can master to keep the house ticking along – and imposing a little bit more of a routine can help a lot without having to spend every spare minute running the vacuum around and dusting.
Little And Often
Creating a daily cleaning plan, broken down into around 15 minutes worth of jobs each day works a lot better than having to save it all up and then spend half of your weekend folding laundry or cleaning your oven. A daily schedule keeps it manageable even with other commitments and stops everything building up or feeling overwhelming.
Give yourself and other members of the household a couple of set tasks a day – fetching and putting away groceries, changing the bedsheets or vacuuming, and aim to tidy up the mess as you go along. For example, every time you have to head upstairs take a second to scan for items that are out of place and need to go up, and the reverse when you head back down.
Inject Some Fun
Housework isn’t very highly ranked on a lot of people’s list of fun things to do, but you can make it more enjoyable by sticking on a cleaning playlist full of uplifting tunes or using the time to listen to a podcast while you clean. Cleaning can be very therapeutic if you approach it the right way – that is, putting your mind on autopilot and enjoying the flow state of engaging with a manual task with a visible result.
If you can manage to combine the time with something else, it gets a lot easier, such as ironing while you catch up with a favorite show. If you’re trying to involve kids, make a game of it. See who can race through the tidying quickest, and stick a timer on to get things moving. If singing a song to hurry the kids along worked for Mary Poppins, it can work for you too!
Readjust Your Standards
Part of not getting swallowed up by domestic chores is making sure that other members of the family also pitch in. However, letting others do things means accepting that they do them differently.
If you have young children or teenagers, try to go a little easier on yourself. Understand that perfect is a complete myth and agree on what you think is acceptable. It’s okay for things to be okay – not 100% all the time. And in all honestly, a lot of the small details will only be noticeable to you anyway.
