Cleaning Ideas

In honour of the cleaning and decluttering I’m doing around here this summer, here are a few ideas for keeping on top of stuff around the house:

1)      Pick one ‘Never Get Around To’ task, and one ‘Big Project’ task to do at a time.  The NGAT should be literally something annoying, small, fixable in minutes, but just…you know, never gotten around to.  For example, my thyme plant, which needed desperately to be trimmed of dead growth and that I had steadily ignored for weeks, but still allowed to get on my nerves every single time I looked at it.  In contrast, the BP is something that you are working on over the course of possibly several days.  Washing the walls in the house would be a BP.  This seems miniscule, but if you did 1 NGAT a day, you would complete 365 of them a year, and 1 BP a week would result in 52 of them in a year.  I can’t even think of 52 BPs in my house.

2)      If you aren’t working outside the home, plan to make housework something that takes 2 hours per day.  If you’re lucky enough to have helpers this, I’m sure, could be cut down substantially.  I’m saying 2 hours because I think you’ll need 1 hour of maintenance cleaning (your daily jobs, like tossing in a load of laundry, washing dishes, etc.) 15 minutes of daily decluttering, 15 minutes of work on your current big project, and 30 minutes of extra time.

3)      Don’t focus on one area at a time.  If Monday is ‘bedroom day’ make sure that you don’t spend your full cleaning time allotment there or else the rest of the house will fall apart over those 24 hours.  It’s much better to split your days into sections that pertain to multiple rooms.  Monday might be ‘window day’, where every window gets cleaned, Tuesday could be ‘carpet day’ and you vacuum all your rugs, etc.

4)      When you get to the end, stop.  Do your task and move on; don’t get sidetracked by other tasks.  If your BP for the next few days is to clean the fridge, for example, spend your 15 minutes on it and don’t decide that “hey, I should start a grocery list!” or “This pickle jar is almost empty; that reminds me that I wanted to rinse out the recycling”. 

5)      Declutter with a purpose.  If you give yourself 15 minutes, utilize a timer and bring a garbage bag.  Make quick decisions and finish your section, don’t try and do something that will take an hour.