4 Habits to Keep Your Home Clean

Everyone wants to keep a tidy home. Having your living spaces clean and organized is about more than presenting a good looking home to visitors and family. It's also about living your best life. When your spaces are cluttered with junk, stress accumulates in your mind to match it. If you find yourself feeling anxious, it might be because your home is a mess.

Tidy Weekly

Tidy at least once a week. Pick a day when you can just tidy things around the house and stick to it. Make cleaning part of your routine. That way, you won't have to make the decision to clean up, it'll just be a thing that you do regularly. The trick to weekly tidying is keep it small. Choose a single room or a single task to tackle. For example, you might choose to vacuum the floors, or clean out the front closet. By making sure it's something small and defined, you can make sure that it's something you can accomplish in a day. Even if your house is a complete mess, you can gradually tackle the overwhelming task, as long as you break it down into bite sized chunks. You might even need to implement a scheme to tidy a few things like the kitchen and the bedroom on a daily basis, depending on how good you are at remembering to put things away as you use them.

Deep Clean Seasonally

Weekly tidying won't take care of deeper dirt, so at least once a year, or ideally once a season, make sure to do a deep clean in order to get accumulated dirt and grunge out of the deep corners of your house. This will likely include things like carpet and upholstery cleaning in order to get rid of deeply ingrained dirt. This is also an ideal time to do a really thorough clean of your bathroom and consider replacing things like the shower curtains and bath mats. Seasonal cleaning can be easy to miss, so try to line it up with a major event. Spring clean when you can open the windows to let fresh air in. Do summer cleaning right before you leave for vacation. Fall cleaning can happen when the kids get out of school and winter cleaning can happen right before the holidays.

Downsize Yearly

Once a year, take stock of your wardrobe, tool boxes, supply closets and pantry. Get rid of anything that's broken beyond repair or expired. If you haven't used it in the last year, consider getting rid of it. If you're not quite ready to get rid of it, seal it up in a box and put it in deep storage to take out one year from now. You may find that one year from now, you've forgotten why you wanted to keep it in the first place.

Limit Storage

Perhaps the most important thing you can do is limit the amount of storage in your house, and stick to it. It's important to know your limits, but it's even more important to know your home's limits when it comes to storage. If you don't have enough places to store it, you need to get rid of it.

The hardest part of keeping your house clean is that you live in it every day. Small messes accumulate as you, your family, your children and your pets go about their daily lives. Don't be too hard on yourself for making small messes every day. It's your home and you should live in it. If you make cleaning a part of your routine, and you stick to it, there will be no need to get stressed out about small messes during the week. You know you can clean every mess up, in time!