No matter how clean you think you keep your home, sometimes it just doesn’t smell fresh, and you’re left scratching your head wondering what to do about it. While having your home regularly cleaned by a cleaning service is a great way of ensuring that dirt and bad smells are kept to a minimum, there are a few simple things you can do yourself, to guarantee a sweeter-smelling home:
- Do your best to keep everyday odors at bay
Some amount of odor is inevitable throughout the course of a regular day in your home, and this can be as a result of pets in need of a bath, cooking, or any other activities that tend to produce a lingering smell. To counteract those not-so pleasing aromas, try opening the windows for an hour or two to allow them to dissipate, and for fresh air to come in and replace them. You can also try cutting a lemon in half and leaving it in offending areas of your home, to absorb the unpleasant aromas. Baking soda also works wonderfully well for absorbing odors, and acts as a natural home deodoriser.
- Don’t let laundry odors prevail
Nothing smells worse than unwashed laundry, particularly if it has had a chance to build up over a few days. Whether you were too busy to do the laundry, or you’ve simply been overwhelmed by too much of it, the longer it lies around, the worse your home will start to smell. It may also be that the washing machine itself is causing a stink, in which case you can run a hot wash using vinegar and baking soda that you’ve placed into the detergent and softener dispenser.
Once you’ve tackled the machine, you can move on to the dirty laundry and get them washed.
Between washes, always leave the door of the machine open so that it has a chance to dry out properly, and change the filter and wipe the gasket as and when needed; you might be surprised at just how much grey gunk is hiding in your washing machine, and the longer it stays there, the worse it will smell.
- Clean your bedroom
While old bedsheets and a stale mattress won’t make the entire home smell, they can certainly do a good job of stinking out the bedroom! As well as washing your sheets at least once a fortnight (ideally you should try to do this every week), you should clean your mattress, too. A good cleansing and deodorising solution that can be sprinkled over the mattress, left for a couple of hours, and the excess vacuumed, consists of baking soda, a little water and white vinegar mixed together.
- Get to grips with kitchen odors
Overflowing trash cans and smelly dishwashers are the prime culprits behind kitchen odors. While emptying the trash can and cleaning inside it once a week usually helps, the dishwasher may need to be deep cleaned once in a while, and luckily, this is easy enough to do with a cupful of white vinegar and a hot cycle.
For refrigerator odors, leaving an open tub of baking soda at the back on a shelf can help to safely absorb food smells, as can cleaning spillages as soon as they occur.
For a smelly sink, be sure to clean it once a day and don’t neglect the plug and plug hole, which can be real breeding grounds for germs and start to smell if bits of food waste are caught up in them.
- Banish bathroom odors
Regular bathroom cleaning is the best solution to smelly problems in this room of the home, and just by keeping the toilet, shower, tub and sinks clean, you can help it smell a lor fresher. Stale towels that haven’t had a chance to dry out properly can also start to smell, so make sure you regularly swap them out, and try to dry them fully between uses.
For a home that smells sweet every day, hire a cleaning company to help make sure all odors are tackled promptly and effectively, and that dust, dirt and mold never has a chance to build up and start a stink.
