Remodel Your Home With These Materials to Make It Easier to Clean

A cleaner home is a happier home. But keeping a clean home isn’t easy: The average person spends about five hours cleaning their home every week, and chances are that doesn’t cover it all. (There’s a reason they call it “housework.”) One of the reasons keeping your home tidy can take so much time and effort has to do with the materials and design of your home. Some materials are easier to keep clean, and some designs that look cool can add minutes or hours to your cleaning schedule.

If you’re considering remodeling or renovating your home, you have the opportunity to not only look at the style and utility of the space, but also how easy it is to keep clean. Making smart design decisions and choosing easy-to-clean materials can save you time and effort.

Don’t make design decisions that will increase the cleaning workload.

Sometimes the shape and arrangement of your items have a big impact on how difficult it is to clean. Whether you’re replacing furniture, fixtures, or anything else, here are a few things that will make your updated home a lot easier to clean and maintain:

• Toilets with lined walls and sides are easier to access and easier to clean. One of the reasons why cleaning a bathroom is such a hassle is that toilets often resemble an elaborate sculpture pressed against the wall, with plenty of nooks and crannies to collect dirt and grime. This wall and skirt toilet eliminates both of these elements, making it much easier to keep the toilet clean. Or take it one step further and simplify your bathroom with a wall-hung toilet with an in-wall cistern .

• Freestanding bathtubs provide one less place for mold to grow. A bathtub that sits on the floor, rather than built into a frame or glued directly to the walls like this one, makes it much easier to clean under and around it, and the lack of caulk around the edges means one less spot for mold and grime to show up. collect further.

• Frameless shower screens are cut at the corners where dirt will collect. If you plan to install a shower stall or shower/tub combination with glass doors or walls, frameless options offer fewer edges that can harden from hard water scale and dirt.

• Large tiles are easier to clean than small ones. If you’re going to tile your walls and floors, large format tiles aren’t just a dramatic design choice, they also mean less grout and grout lines are essentially tiny valleys of horror where dirt accumulates. The fewer there are, the better.

• Floating cabinets and vanities are easier to clean. As with the toilet, any place where a piece of furniture is directly on the floor will be a magnet for dirt. Cabinets that float off the floor make it easy to mop or vacuum underneath. And while it’s true that cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling have their drawbacks , if your goal is to clean less, they can eliminate the dusty desert ecosystem that forms on top of your cabinets.

• It is easier to clean under raised furniture. Likewise, avoid choosing furniture that sits low or directly on the floor. If you can’t fit a vacuum cleaner under your sofa, it will soon become the dirtiest place in your home, but you won’t notice until the next time you move or refurbish your furniture. Choose furniture with legs that leave space underneath accessible.

• Flat doors are easier to clean than panel doors. If your kitchen and bathroom doors are paneled, you will notice that dirt and grease accumulate in the seams and cleaning them can be a tedious task. Choosing cabinets with a flat surface means that cleaning your doors will be a simple task by wiping them down with a dusting rag, especially if you ‘re doing away with pulls or handles altogether.

These materials can reduce cleaning time.

The design choices you make are one aspect of making your home easy to clean. The other is included in the materials you choose:

• Microfiber upholstery repels stains. Our furniture collects dust, pet hair and spills. The best choices for upholstery are microfiber, which can be cleaned with a quick vacuum and an occasional soap scrub, or vinyl, which can imitate other materials (like leather) but is also very easy to clean.

• Seamless floors clean much faster. Although hardwood floors and ceramic tiles are durable and relatively easy to clean, they both have one drawback: grout lines. The spaces between wood planks and grout lines between tiles will always be difficult to keep clean. This makes seamless options like vinyl or sealed concrete the best in terms of keeping things clean.

• Choose carpet tiles instead of carpet. If you want carpet in your home, any stain can turn into a disaster. One way to make cleaning and maintaining your carpet easier is to choose carpet tiles instead. If you spill something or a pet gets a stain on your carpet, you can simply pull out the tiles and wash them or replace them without much hassle. (Of course, it may not be as chic or inviting as you’d like, but if you’ve ever had to pick up dirty carpet and upholstery in rooms, you might not mind.)

• Choose non-porous countertops. Unlike natural stones like granite, quartz is a non-porous material, meaning it doesn’t stain as easily and doesn’t require much maintenance—quartz countertops can usually just be wiped down with a damp cloth. Solid surface materials such as Corian are also easy to clean, but are easier to cut and are not as heat resistant.

• Stainless steel appliances… no. While stainless steel is an excellent choice for kitchen and laundry appliances, it’s not ideal from a cleaning standpoint: despite its name, stainless steel can rust and discolor, showing all sorts of fingerprints and water stains. If you’re replacing appliances as part of a remodel or simple upgrade, fingerprint-resistant stainless steel is your best bet. This material has a clear coating over the metal that protects it from stains and other dirt, making it much easier to keep clean. Also consider a sealed burner for your cooktop, which will prevent crumbs, grease and food particles from getting under the cooktop.

• Choose wall coverings that can be washed. As with flooring, the easiest wall covering materials to maintain will be seamless. Ceramic tiles are durable, but grout lines will always bother you. Paint can be one of the easiest surfaces to clean if you choose a gloss, semi-gloss, or satin finish (if the sheen is too shiny for the room), especially if you choose a paint with an easy-to-clean formula. Steer clear of flat finishes if you’re generally prone to clutter or if you have children.

  Another rarely considered option is reverse-tinted glass (especially for kitchen backsplashes, although it can be a great choice for bathroom walls). While this may be a more expensive option, the seamless nature of this material makes it easy to clean.

• Consider window cleaners that you can throw in the washing machine. Once you install window coverings, you’ll probably stop thinking about them—until the day you notice they’ve turned into a thick layer of dust. While you’ll likely need to dust your window coverings regularly, blinds can be especially annoying and can be time-consuming to clean. Curtains or fabric curtains can be removed and at least thrown into the washing machine.

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