Keep Your Home Clean by Dividing It Into Parts
Regardless of how big or small your home is, if you are naturally unkempt, keeping it clean can be tricky. I live in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, which means it doesn’t take long for my home to look like it’s completely derailed. Added to my problem, not only with space, is the fact that I’m just a messy person by nature. For a while, I thought I was just destined to live in a mess – until I started cleaning up piece by piece.
The idea for the section was something I came up with a few weeks before a friend from out of town came to visit me. I knew I needed to tidy up my place, but my work schedule, coupled with the level of dirt in my place, made it quite an impossible task, so I tore it up. After living in disarray, I feel that since then my apartment has been maintained at a reasonable level of cleanliness.
This is how it works:
- Divide your home into seven sections based on how dirty they are usually. The idea is to clear seven areas, which will take you an hour or less. So, if your bedroom is a nightmare, then perhaps it should be split in two, and the unused guest room and guest bath could potentially be combined into one. Think: What can I really clean up in an hour? Never create a “section” that will take much longer.
- Assign a day of the week to each section. For example, Friday is my toilet day. That means every Friday I sprinkle toilet cleaner down the toilet, wipe the countertops, hit the floor with the flush, and spray the shower. It took a long time the first time. Now that I do this every week, I can do it in 15 minutes.
- After you have divided everything, make it a rule (at least a week) to stick to your schedule and get these areas in order. Obviously, this is a little easier for me, since I have a small house. If you have a larger one, then you may need to extend the initial cleaning by several weeks. Make it manageable for you and your schedule. Otherwise, you will probably give it up.
- After this initial cleaning, make a maintenance schedule that you can stick to. For example, I clean my living area on Wednesday evenings, which coincides with the time I watch TV shows that I like on Hulu. I watch TV and clean up during commercials. My kitchen usually gets out of hand during the week, so I take it on on Saturdays as I know I will have more time.
Breaking things down into smaller, easier-to-use chunks sounds simple, but for some reason I have never tried it before. When I tried to handle the whole apartment, I often failed, even when I gave myself the whole day, because I was too overwhelmed, distracted and ultimately exhausted.
Now I am the happy owner of a moderately clean apartment, and after a few years it has remained so, despite the fact that I live in it.
Do you have your own tricks for keeping clean? Let us know what you are doing in the comments.