Ever wonder how some people keep their home clean ALL the time? Here are the 12 best kept secrets to keeping a clean house.
A clean and tidy space allows us to relax at home after a long day at work. Whether you are a busy person who is barely at home or a stay-at-home parent, these awesome cleaning tips will help you achieve a clean house without stress.
Let’s get started!
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Secrets To Keeping A Clean House
How do you to keep your house always clean? It’s easy! Keep a regular cleaning routine to maintain a tidy home (and to keep your house from becoming too nasty, cluttered, and difficult to clean).
In this post, I’ve listed the best secrets to keeping a clean house. Depending on how dirty your house currently is, it might take some effort. However once you are able to achieve a clean house, it is easy to maintain it with these 12 helpful tips!
1. Clean And Tidy Your House In The Morning
The absolute best time to tidy up your house is in the morning. Even if you have a busy schedule, you should be able to allocate a small amount of time everyday to clean up your house.
I recommend using this short amount of time to:
- Clear up surfaces.
- Place displaced items back to their dedicated places.
- Fold your bed.
Focus on tidying up rather than actual cleaning. There’s no need to pull out the vacuum yet! Every morning, after I get ready for the day, I spend about 5 to 10 minutes just doing these three simple tasks.
This is one of my best secrets to keeping a clean house. It barely takes any time and effectively keeps my home from cluttering up and looking like a mess.
2. Get Essential Cleaning Supplies
If you don’t already own basic cleaning supples, I recommend rounding up a few items to get started. Cleaning supplies make home cleaning easier and help cut down cleaning time. Although there are so many types of cleaning supplies available, you only need a variation of the 6 products listed below.
For people who are not sure where to start, I’ve listed my favorite budget cleaning supplies I use to clean my home every week:
- Mrs. Meyer’s Dish Soap 3 Pack (Lemon Scent)
$11.97$8.49* - Mr. Siga Washable Duster $9.98*
- Microfiber Cleaning Cloth 12 Pack $11.99*
- Mrs. Meyer’s Multi-Surface Cleaner
$6.50$3.88* - Swifter Dry And Wet Floor Cleaner
$14.99$6.49* - Libman Broom And Dustpan Set $17.00*
(*Price on day of publishing)
Utilizing basic cleaning supplies is one of the best ways to keep your house clean and smelling fresh all the time. For people who have carpet floors or rugs, you’ll need to utilize a vacuum cleaner (not listed above).
You might have noticed I listed dish soap as #1. Dish soap is one of the best inexpensive, multipurpose cleaning supplies. For people who are looking for additional ways to clean with dish soap, I wrote a post on frugal awesome ways to use dish soap at home.
3. Have A Place For Everything
To prevent clutter from piling up, allocate a place for EVERY item you own. This is one of the best secrets to a clean house AND helps you know exactly where you put everything.
Say no more to lost items! For better organization, I recommend grouping and storing similar items. For example, store cleaning supplies on the same shelf in the closet and keep all your throw blankets in the same storage bin. This cleaning secret is how you can easily keep your house always clean and organized.
4. Make The Most Out Of Organizers
If you have a small house/apartment and need extra storage, I recommend looking out for clever organizers to maximum your space. A must have home organizer is a set of storage bins!
Storage bins are awesome ways to add extra storage, and keep items tucked way and organized. I recommend using a foldable storage bin in your house like this beautiful and clever collapsible fabric storage cube set by Decomomo. When you don’t use them, you can simply fold them up and store them without taking up much space.
Be on the look out for clever organizers! You can find several ideas by just searching up space saving organizers on Amazon. Another awesome idea to add extra storage space is to utilize a door organizers (like this hanging shoe organizer) to help clear up clutter.
Organizers are one of the best secrets to keeping your home decluttered all the time. Need help keeping a small pantry tidy? I wrote a post on the best budget pantry organizers and containers to help you make the most out of a small space.
5. Schedule Specific Days For Cleaning
How do you motivate yourself to always clean and keep your house tidy? Have a cleaning schedule!
Scheduling and planning specific cleaning tasks on a weekly or daily basis makes it more likely for you to actually clean. I recommend either spreading out specific cleaning tasks throughout the week or dedicate an entire day to clean your house.
Plan your cleaning around your schedule and preference. A cleaning schedule helps you know exactly what chores will need to be done, as well as, how much time you’ll need to set aside. Since I prefer to clean everything in one go, I dedicate my cleaning time to every Saturday morning.
6. Surfaces Should Always Be Clear
Looking for tips on how to keep a clean house with a busy schedule? One of the best and easiest secrets to keeping a clean house, is to clear up surfaces often. Tabletops, countertops, and other heavily used surfaces tend to clutter up easily and make your house look messy.
I recommend cleaning up surfaces every so often to keep your house always tidy looking. Your surfaces don’t need to be clear 100% of the time (after all, you’ll need to use them). Try clearing up tabletops and surfaces every morning or night.
Depending on how much of a mess you’ve made that day, this task should take less than 5 minutes, but will make your house look so much cleaner. By cleaning up surfaces daily, your surfaces will be much easier to clean and prevent them from cluttering up too much throughout the week.
7. Declutter Your House
Got too much stuff? If you are running out of storage and barely use most of the stuff you own, it might be time to declutter your home. By this, I mean reducing the amount of unnecessary items you have in your house. I recommend going through each section of each room of your house and deciding whether or to donate, sell, or keep the items you own.
Chances are, you’ll find items you’ve never use or even care about! Decluttering your house is one way to easily clear up your space and make you one step closer to keeping your house always clean. It is also easier to clean up and keep your place clean with less stuff.
Got too much clothes in your closet? It might be time to downsize your wardrobe. For people who need to stop buying clothes they don’t need, I wrote a post with several helpful tips.
8. Buy Less Stuff
If you live in a small space, you’ll know how quickly an apartment or house can get cluttered and messy. Buying less stuff is one of the best secrets to keeping a clean house because you aren’t adding more clutter to your home! Not to mention, your wallet will thank you!
For people who aren’t sure how to spend less, I recommend only buying new things for your home to replace furniture, decor, or broken appliances. If you love decorating, limit how much decor you can have at your house at all times. If your house or apartment is starting to look cluttered after a few purchases, consider selling or donating some items to clear up your space.
9. Wash Your Dishes Every Night
How do you easily keep your house and kitchen always clean? Do the dishes EVERY night. If you cook regularly at home, you’ll know how easily dishes can pile up in your sink.
I recommend making it a habit to do your dishes every night even if you didn’t use many dishes that day.
This way, you’ll always start the day with a clean, empty kitchen sink and you’ll won’t have to worry about dirty dishes until the end of the day. Dishes are also easier to clean on the same day!
10. Clean Before It Becomes Unbearable
One of the secrets to keeping a clean house is have a regular light cleaning schedule.
Although this may seem contradictory, you don’t need to thoroughly clean your house. By this, I mean you don’t need to wipe down every inch of your space with strong cleaners. Every time you clean, just focus on making your house or apartment a little less dirty.
Every house inevitably becomes dirty. Even if you did an amazing job cleaning up every speck of dust from your coffee table, it’s going to dusty again by the end of the week.
Whenever I clean my home, I lightly clean everything. To always have a clean home, simply clean up your house before the dirt and dust piles up and it becomes too nasty to clean. My motto for cleaning is to clean an area before it gets to a point where you don’t want to clean it anymore.
11. Sort The Mail As Soon As You Receive It
Everyone receives mail everyday. For people who don’t get mail delivered straight through door, I recommend making it a habit to go to the pick up your mail from the mailbox everyday. This will help prevent mail from piling up in your mailbox.
As soon as you get your mail, don’t just set your mail down to deal with later. You can easily clutter your surfaces with envelopes and make it difficult to go through your letters in the future.
To always keep your house clean, go through your mail as soon as you receive them. Throw out anything that’s not important and place the remaining letters into a mail organizer like this budget desktop letter sorter (you can get one for less than ten bucks!). I highly recommend using a mail organizer so you don’t accidentally misplace important letters in a drawer or clutter up your workspace.
12. Ask For Help If You Need It
In this post, I’ve gathered several tips on how to keep a clean house with a busy schedule. For some homes, basic cleanliness and organization can be a huge struggle. If you can’t find time to clean up your house, you might need to seek some cleaning help from others.
Whether that means to getting a professional cleaner or recruiting some family members/housemates to declutter your house, don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you live a place with multiple people, one of the best ways to keep your house clean all the time is ask people to contribute to household chores and weekly cleaning.
Conclusion: Secrets To Keeping A Clean House
Maintaining a clean home takes dedication and effort. To easily keep your house always clean, allocate a small amount of time every week to clean and tidy up. Using this hack, it’s possible keeping house clean working full time!
One of the best secrets to keeping a clean house is to create and enforce a cleaning schedule. If you live with others, talk to your housemates about assigning and scheduling specific cleaning tasks for each person.
The more people in your household, the more clutter and mess. Unless you want to dedicate a huge chunk of time out of the week to clean your house, allocate some cleaning responsibilities to other members of your house.
I hope this post gave you some helpful tips on how to keep a clean house with a busy schedule!