If you’ve been busy with everything that life has thrown at you, you can easily be excused for having fallen behind with the cleaning at home. But, while there can be many entirely valid reasons for having let cleanliness get the better of you, the fact will always remain that a dirty home, is an unhealthy (and often unhappy) one. The cleaning will need to be tackled at some point in the not too distant future; if not for your sake, then for the sake of others you may share your home with, including pets. If this means doing the work yourself instead of hiring a cleaning company to do it for you, you may find that taking the first steps towards doing so, can be difficult and overwhelming.
With this in mind, here are some simple steps you can take to kickstart your cleaning schedule, and get on the path towards a healthier, happier home.
- Focus on feeding and clothing your family
The chances are that if your home is dirty and a mess, your refrigerator and pantry may well be, too. So, as feeding yourself and your loved ones nutritious food is of the absolute importance, begin by creating an inventory of all food items. Then throw out any rotten produce or items that have been kept opened for too long, and make a list of what you need in order to get stocked up again, including both fresh and pantry items. At the first available opportunity, go to the store and get stocked up.
Then, if your laundry pile is beginning to resemble Mount Everest, and smelling less than savory, take a morning or afternoon to try and get on top of it, so that not only can you and your family eat well, but you can wear clean clothes, too.
- Create a straightforward morning routine
With a morning cleaning and tidying schedule in place, you can easily start making sure that every day in your home, is a clean, tidy and healthy one. although your first morning cleaning routine may take an entire day, once you get into the groove of it, it will become much quicker and a lot more painless.
From loading the dishwasher, to taking out the trash, tidying away clutter, making the beds, and sorting through the laundry, what your morning checklist looks like may well be completely different to someone else’s, but that’s perfectly okay.
- Create a straightforward afternoon and/or evening routine
By breaking your chores up into manageable chunks that you can split between morning and the rest of the day, you’ll easily fit other things into your daily schedule, such as your own work, walking the dog, dropping your kids off at school etc.
Think about what you weren’t able to get done in the morning, and what must be done before the end of the day. If your refrigerator and pantry are full, and the laundry is drying for instance, then you can shift your focus to tasks such as cleaning the bathroom and kitchen. But don’t feel as if everything has to be done in one day; start small, and as you reach the end of the week, you should feel much more on top of things than you did at the beginning of the week.
Your daily chore list may seem large at first, but it will shrink as you get into a cleaning rhythm, and start cleaning and tidying areas of the home automatically.
- Do at least one cleaning chore per day
Once you feel that your home is as clean as you’d like it to be, you can either stick to your am and pm cleaning schedules, or choose at least one cleaning task to fulfil every day without fail.
Ultimately, achieving a clean home can be hard, especially when you add kids and pets into the equation (and several days or weeks of neglect), but by following the steps above, you can create a cleaner home for the entire household to enjoy.
