5 New Year Cleaning Resolutions for a Clean and Orderly Home
Home cleaning may sound like the most boring chore in the world, but it feels extremely rewarding when it’s over. If you dread cleaning your house for the holidays or for a special occasion such as a weekend party, adopting small cleaning habits can drastically reduce your work as well as your anxiety.
Cleaning and organization experts say that making small cleaning an everyday practice can take the drudge work out of spring-cleaning, and it also saves you money and time on heavy-duty deep cleaning.
A clean and organized home is a calming sanctuary for its occupants. Here are five cleaning resolutions you should make for this New Year and turn them into a habit for everyone in the family, so that your living space radiates positive, calm and inspiring vibes all through the year.
Spruce up your living room every night
It takes only two to three minutes to clean up the living room, and it feels great to walk past a clean living room the next morning, when you’re rushing to get out and in the evening, when you know you’re not going home to a mess.
If your living room is where your family gets together every evening, put away remotes, magazines, food plates, throws and so on before you call it a night—you’ll thank yourself in the morning and won’t dread the weekend cleaning fest as much.
Make your bed first thing in the morning
You’ll be surprised to know that it does not take more than a minute or two to make the bed, but if you leave it a mess, it will play on your subconscious for a large part of the day. In fact, according to psychologists, the effects of making the bed in the morning go far beyond having a clean bedroom in the evening.
Making the bed is often part of sage advice on life organization, as this simple morning ritual can energize you and give you a feeling of calm and control as you prepare for your day. Try it for a week and see how it makes you feel, aside from helping you sleep better.
Give your kitchen 30 cleaning minutes every weekend
Clear the kitchen counters every night after dinner to experience the joy of walking into a clean kitchen the next morning. Before you go to bed, take a quick peek into the refrigerator to find stuff you should have thrown away last night and things you need to use for breakfast to save them from spoiling. You’ll find this much less time-consuming than a big-deal weekend fridge clean-up.
To keep your kitchen clean, rather than waiting for that one fine day when you’ll have the time and intention to clean inside out, give it 20 to 30 minutes every Saturday or Sunday morning. Clean a cabinet or two or clean the appliances in one session, clean the dishwasher the next week and so forth. This simple habit will take away the enormity of the task and also keep your kitchen free of disease-causing microorganisms.
Be open to hiring professional cleaning help
There are times when you just can’t do it all on your own. Instead of allowing yourself to feel overwhelmed, anxious and stressed thinking of all that you must accomplish before a big day, hire a professional cleaning service to come clean your home so that you can focus on other important tasks.
Cleaning services are available in a number of formats, such as one-time cleaning; recurring service in the form of bi-weekly, weekly, monthly and quarterly deep cleaning; move-in and move-out cleaning; and pre-holiday and post-holiday cleaning.
Wipe your bathroom after every shower
Keep a wiper and a cleaning cloth handy to wipe up the floor and surfaces of your bathroom every other morning, if not every morning. It may sound like a lot when you’re racing against the clock, but try it a couple of times and you’ll see that it doesn’t take more than a minute. Once this becomes a habit, you’ll have a hard time leaving your bathroom in a mess.
Leave scrubbing the toilet and the tiles for the weekend, but tell yourself that you won’t devote more than 30 minutes of your Saturday to bathroom cleaning. This way you’ll make the most of your cleaning time.
In addition, take a good look at your bathroom and find out why it becomes a mess so quickly. Get laundry baskets and wall-mounted organizers to keep it more orderly on a daily basis.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
