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Few people look forward to cleaning their home; it’s a time consuming, laborious, and often messy endeavor that gets in the way of pursuing leisure activities—but it is a necessity.
Performing domestic drudgery doesn’t have to be a dreadful experience, though. Knowing how to clean house like a professional will save you time and money, so we put together a list of tips from the pros to simplify the task of making your home’s interior sparkle.
Knowing Where to Start
After working all day, shuttling the kids to and from practice, cooking dinner, walking the dog, and tackling the laundry, finding time to give your home a thorough scrub-down might seem overwhelming. Create a house cleaning checklist of everything you want to accomplish in each area of your home, and then assign one room to each member of your household. Having a strategic plan-of-attack in place will make the cleaning process less daunting.
Clutter Is Not Your Friend
Clutter; everyone has some, and nobody enjoys figuring out what to pitch and what to keep. Those old issues of Cosmo and Sports Illustrated that somehow became a small mountain of print media while you slept, do you really need them? You could give a new lease on life to those dolls your daughter hasn’t looked at since she discovered the trove of makeup tutorials on YouTube by sending Barbie, Ken, and Skipper to a charitable organization, your church, or a less fortunate child. Don’t be afraid to take a ruthless approach to sending the various dust collectors in your home to the recycle bin or the trash barrel.
Top to Bottom, Left to Right
Vacuuming before you dust doesn’t make much sense, because all you’ll end up doing is knocking dust and allergens down on your clean carpet. Use a microfiber duster to clean window blinds, fan blades, and the corners where cobwebs congregate before you move on to cleaning your floors. Starting in the corner farthest from the door, clean each room from top to bottom, and then left to right, working your way back towards the room’s entrance.
The Trick to Streak-free Windows
Utilizing old newspapers and vinegar to clean your windows will make the glass shine like diamonds in the sun while minimizing the amount of paper towel and empty plastic bottles of household cleaning products that you and your family send to the landfill on a weekly basis. To clean large, hard-to-reach windows, invest in a high-quality squeegee with an extension pole.
Keeping your Kitchen and Bathrooms Tidy
In most homes, bacteria grow fastest in the kitchen and the bathrooms. The combination of moisture, organic matter, and heat create a perfect environment for illness-causing microscopic organisms to thrive. Cleaning with a mixture of bleach and water will eliminate most germs on hard surfaces. Granite countertops and marble floors may not take kindly to that concoction, though, so you should first apply the solution to an inconspicuous area to ensure you don’t damage to those pricey countertops.
Scrub your shower’s walls with a bristled brush to reach the cooties hiding in the grout, and be sure to clean the drain, as well as around the soap dish. Don’t forget to attack those hard-to-reach places behind the toilet when you’re cleaning your floors. After you’ve given everything a proper scrub, allow the areas to air dry, rinse with them with clean water to remove any chemical residue, and then dry them again with a clean cloth or microfiber towel.
Now that you’ve cleaned everything spic-and-span, you can get back to enjoying the comforts of your home with your loved ones.
