IT IS NOT always easy to keep your home looking spotless, sometimes life just gets in the way and before you know it you have a lot of clutter.
But that doesn’t mean you have to spend all your free time cleaning and tidying up your home.
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According to cleaning expert Melissa Marker, there are seven things you can easily add to your daily routine that will make cleaning up a breeze.
Since Melissa has been running a cleaning company since 2006, she knows a thing or two about tidying up.
Don’t keep everything
Melissa said, “This talks about the importance of tidying up or finding things that are out of place or just don’t belong in your house anymore.”
The pro explained that when you clean up a space, you don’t just put away a pile of stuff, look through it and see if you really should keep everything, or if there is a better place to live.
Clear horizontal planes
“Clutter attracts junk and when a horizontal surface like a table has clutter, it’s easy to put another item there,” said the cleaning lady.
It only takes a few minutes of your day to keep countertops and tables tidy, but it means you’re less likely to leave other clutter when it’s already clean.
Have non-negotiable tasks
“This will make your blood boil every day,” Melissa said, “and this will be different for you than it is for me, because we all live different lives.”
For some people, it might be making the bed every morning, cleaning their desk at the end of the road at home, or emptying the dishwasher.
If there’s something that really annoys you when it’s not done, make it a priority.
Clear clutter
An easy way to deal with the dreaded junk drawer is to empty everything into a box and keep the box out of the way somewhere, like a garage.
Then, over the course of a few months, if you need something out of the box, you can grab it and put it back in the drawer.
After a few months, anything left in the box is messy and can be donated or thrown away, the pro explained.
Just do it once
It’s easy to get distracted by other things when you’re cleaning up, but in the long run it becomes that much harder to keep your house clean.
Melissa said, “When you enter a room and you have stuff in your hands, it’s tempting to put it down and deal with it later.
“But things don’t usually happen later and then things are gathering dust, so deal with the item right now.”
This way you don’t have to go back to things again and again and you shorten your to-do list.
Love your cleaning tools
“Buy things you love, things you like are things you’ll use,” Melissa said.
It’s all well and good, you have an expensive vacuum cleaner, but if it’s heavy and awkward to use, chances are you won’t.
Make sure you really like your cleaning products and tools so that cleaning up becomes less of a chore.
Set a time limit
The eager cleaner said: “Since we hate cleaning, the only way to make it manageable is to set a time limit.
The pro recommended having something to listen to, like a playlist or podcast, which is a certain amount of time you can spend cleaning and a hard stop when it’s done.
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