How do you keep your homes clean?
How do you keep your homes clean?
I've just swept and mopped. Once the floor dries, I could easily go sweep again and turn up more dust and dirt. If I were to mop again, I'm almost certain the water in my bucket would be filthy. It feels like it's never actually clean.
Beyond that, there's dusting, cleaning windows, sinks, countertops, bathrooms, and probably things I don't even consider. How do you all stay on top of these things?
Bold of you to assume my home is clean.
You're never going to be sterile; good enough is good enough.
Keep an abundance of cleaning supplies. Soaps and rags in the kitchen and the bathroom. Think about investing in a vacuum and a carpet cleaning machine. Edit = Also get more trash bins. One for the kitchen, one for the desk, one by the coffee table, one for the bathroom.
Some people find it easier to do one big push where they clean the whole house in one session; other folks like to do a little bit every day. Figure out which type you are.Also, check and see what cleaners charge in your area. It might be worth it to have a pro come in and do the work for you. Figure out what your leisure time is worth to you and then compare.
If you’re sweeping, it’s possible you’re kicking a lot of dust up in the air, so that by the time you’re done mopping, it has resettled back down on the floor. You could mitigate this by vacuuming instead, or opening your windows and using fans to blow air out of your house. But also, you’ll never get all of the dust anyway.
In newer construction, especially high-rise apartments, there’s a lot less dust. But in older buildings, it’s just an endless torrent, and the solution has been…
Robot vacuums
While they must be maintained, and won’t work well if you’re not diligent about picking up and keeping obstacles off the floor, they make it far easier to keep the whole house clean by reducing the overall volume of interior dust and debris inside the building envelope.
To illustrate (this will be gross) I change the bags about every month and weigh them and it’s usually ~1 kg (~2 lbs) per bag, and each year they remove roughly 30-40 kg (70-90 lbs). And every time I’ve cut them open to see what’s causing all the weight (or make sure nothing important was eaten) it appears to be mostly dust and hair.
It’s freaky thinking how all of that would be floating around, settling on surfaces, collecting in corners and crevices, saturating carpets and upholstery, and of course getting breathed in constantly. Instead I don’t have to manually dust and vacuum very often and our indoor AQI is usually better than outside.
So yeah. Robots.
Edit: added imperial mass equivalents
Keeping your house clean is a good thing to do. But it's easy to stray into obsession territory. There lies madness.
Remember we all have far more visitor microbes in our bodies than our own host cells. Life is dirty. Life is germy. Embrace this.
You don't need to live in a hoarder hell hole, but the sooner you accept that living is a messy business the more time you'll have to enjoy actually living. Cleaning tasks should be quick and efficient, not sterilization.
Beyond that, there's dusting, cleaning windows, sinks, countertops, bathrooms, and probably things I don't even consider.
Of all the items you've listed, I personally rank floors as the most important to clean, followed by bathrooms, countertops, sinks, windows, and finally dusting. These are in order of which are used more frequently and how easily they'd be noticed. A dirty window (on the outside) is rarely dirty enough to outright block the sunlight, but grime on the floor will be tracked into other rooms, worsening the issue. Bathrooms are used daily, so would bother me if they're not at least reasonably seemly.
For keep floor clean, the zeroth step is to prevent dirt and grime from coming in at the onset. A shoes-off policy in the home is probably the most substantial in this effort. That's not to say you have to go barefoot -- although I do think it's quite nice -- since indoor slippers or shoes are an option. The next step would be to rip out all wall-to-wall carpet, if possible. I have a full rant about the drawbacks of carpet, but it will suffice to say that carpet traps dust and dirt whereas hard surfaces like tile or laminate do not.
After that, you may need to identify what exactly is dirtying your floors. If it's loose particulate (eg food crumbs), that's going to need a different solution than if it's loose hairs, which is different than dust or clothes threads. Crumbs or hair might suggest localized sweeping in the kitchen or bathroom will be most effective, while dust or threads suggest you need to adjust your clothes dryer settings, or your central air system needs a new/different filter.
The thing to keep in mind with all this is that grime does not come from nowhere: there is always a source, and the evidence will lead you to what's most effective to keep your home maintained. Even if you conclude that the dust is fallout from the nearby coal-burning power station, there will still be things you can do, such as
campaigning for a fossil-fuel free worldelectrostatic air filters or keeping doors closed when not needed.I have a roomba to get rid of 80% every day. I strive to manually vacuum once a week, because the roomba doesn't do corners and some hard to reach bits. Nor can it do stairs, obviously. After vacuuming I run a steam mop over the floors, which is amazing and SO much faster than regular mopping, without any cleaning agents.
Since its a combination steam mop/hand thing, I also use it for the windows. That's not on any schedule, just when I think they're dirty.
I wetwipe the countertop after I make dinner, and I clean it with soap whenever it looks dirty enough to be worth the effort.
Honestly, things like wooden floors can be hand-scrubbed four or five times before being actually clean, but it feel that anything that's stuck on there after running the steam mop is probably not coming off during normal use, so it qualifies as clean enough.
I have 2 dogs and a cat and have hard floors throughout. The roboVac runs twice per day and is always FULL when I empty it after every run. In addition my roboMop runs 3 days a week. My job at home is no longer cleaning but, roboTending 😂
But yes, taking off your shoes from outdoors is a must. We all keep a pair birks just for use inside.
Vacuum. It sucks up the dirt and traps it.
Brooms & mops were from the ancient days before electricity existed, and as you've experienced, the dirt just keeps circulating and never goes away. Endless filth & frustration.
I have a mastiff. Truly clean will never be a thing again.
I'm a little late to the party but keep in mind that people who stay on top of cleaning and have sparkling houses are doing just that and nothing else because it is so time consuming. You don't want to invest all your free time (or all your time) into cleaning that will never end. Good enough is good enough.
Set a weekly cleaning day and stick to it. On weeks when you can't clean on that day, move it to a different day. Don't skip.
And no shoes inside, ever. Tracks in lots of filth, even when you think you have clean shoes.
Roomba twice a day. A dishwasher run every day. A biweekly cleaning by a professional, and a tolerance for some degree of chaos. We live in the world, not in some clean lab. There will be dirt, dust, clutter. Just don't let it get too much.
I have a yard of weeds, and a flower garden and a vegetable garden, some trees. It will never be a weed free environment in my gardens, I just try to advantage the plants I want, and keep the weeds under control not gone. Same with the house, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
i don't.
As someone with OCD in the form of germaphobia and excessive/repetitive cleaning, I recommend you see a doctor and get tested for OCD. Doing therapy massively improved my quality of life.
As a wise friend once said about home repairs "It's easier to keep up than to catch up"
You can do a lot at once, you can do a little all the time but either way you have to clean regularly to stay on top of it.
I gave up keeping the floor clean, I'm the only one that cleaned in the house, any complaints about the dirt on the floor was met with "well you should be wearing shoes", any attempt at cleaning the clutter is met with the other household members stressed out because things changed. I take any W I can, but it's defo a learn to get used to it type of situation at least in my case, and dirt isn't going to go away sadly.
I had to start wearing slippers so I didn't feel the dirt and it stopped getting in my sheets, that might help you avoid noticing it as much if you don't already do so
It feels like it’s never actually clean.
Keeping things neat and tidy is literally an endless battle against entropy.
I mean, it's not like I can get rid of the waterbugs in my eyelashes when I take a shower. Becoming truly "clean" would mean destroying all physical traces of, well, everything. We would have to be made of pure energy to be really "clean."
In short, the organic biological world in which we exist will always be interminably filthy.
Daily tidying tasks: dishes asap, litter box, laundry, spray cleaner on the shower after showering. Once a week the more laborious tasks get done: vacuuming, mopping etc. Bathrooms every 3 weeks or so. It’s a constant rotation that I would struggle with alone… my spouse and I tag-team all cleaning together so that helps. Consistency with cleaning helps everything to stay relatively clean. If it ever gets to be too much to keep up with in the future, we’ve agreed that a weekly cleaner might be a good option to help us maintain.
I do the dishes as soon as possible, wipe the kitchen surfaces daily if used, I scrub the toilets the second they don't look sparkling (to prevent gross buildup, maybe every 10 days, there are no stand-pee-ers in this house spraying piss everywhere lol), my Roomba runs every 2 days to get most dust on the floor that normally would get kicked back up, and I pay for some house cleaners to come once a month to get what I missed and do a better job at it.
Make sure that you cleaning routine is top to bottom. Wipe off the blinds, wipe the counters and appliances, moving down until the floor, which is last. Even if it isn’t perfect, it’s better than completely dirty, right? Progress is progress.
Smaller houses tend to be better for this, generally. Cut down on all the stupid useless crap you own that you only use like once every 3 years, it's not worth it to keep it sitting around. Buy and sell everything on craigslist, and rent the rest of what you might need. Maybe look into a storage shed or something, or dedicate a portion of your house to this, a room, something like this. Most people have a garage, I think. Pawn stuff off on everyone around you, call them when you need it, and then that's a good opportunity to socialize. The same goes for "makerspaces" or whatever. Get out of your house more.
Work from the top down, start in an area with your fans, cobwebs, whatever, then work down to the pictures and higher shelves, the windows, lower shelves, tables, then hit your walls and baseboards, and then, after all that's done, do the floors.
Remove clutter and little aesthetic baubles on shelves where dust and hair and crap might accumulate, unless you're actively using the things in that space, or frequently moving stuff around in that area. It also pays to be conscious of how airflow moves throughout your house and how dust settles. It always tends to be the corners, but then corners also tend to be the deadzones where people put things anyways. If you can turn this on it's head, and keep things away from the walls and corners more, that's probably a decent idea, and could also help you open up your house more. If you can't do that, you could look into like, these triangular dust guards they make for the corners of things, especially stairs, though those are mostly for sweeping, and I think dust might end up sticking to them regardless. The best solution for most people is probably just to go in the complete opposite direction, and get some big sealed corner cabinets with actual doors, instead of just having a bunch of open shelves everywhere.
Make sure you always remove your shoes when you come in from outside, and if you're especially dirty, your outerwear. It's easier to clean this all in one location by the door. Cats and dogs and all your other pets also shed a ton which can suck really bad and get on everything. I really like having pets, but god damn it can get pretty nasty. I would probably not do it all over again if I had the choice. Maybe look for breeds that don't shed as much. Or just brush your pets maybe more than daily, that might also help.
Also, invest in a good stick vacuum, don't get one of those huge corded garbage vacuums, or those ones that roll around and have the tube, those also suck and are awful. Also a good spray mop with the bottom that sticks to the cloth pad, and not like a normal stupid mop with a bucket or whatever, because those suck.
Yeah. Do all that, revolve your life around just cleaning and maintaining the shit that you own, and then you can probably get away with like an hour maybe once or twice a week for your whole house. How fulfilling!
A plan. Clean all floors weekly.
I keep up on my hvac air filters to help with dust, and have a no shoes in the house rule.
Clean as you go. When you’re done with food, wash the plate or put it in the dishwasher. When you’re done with your shower, take yesterdays dirty clothes downstairs and put them in the washing machine. After you are done dressing in the morning, wipe down the bathroom sink etc with the hand towel. Buy a roomba and set it loose before you leave for work.
I splurged on a Bissell cross wave pet and I can’t believe how amazing it really is. I wish I would have gotten the cordless version but it really has changed how often and easy it is to keep our floors clean!
I also really try to do a “closing shift” every night. And even if I have dishes in the sink, they have all been rinsed.
I wipe down the surfaces in the half bath every time I use it.
And I wipe the hand rails and base boards once every couple of months. We have 4 kids so there is always some kind of “mess” but I’ve gotten so much better about keeping up with the house. And I don’t beat myself up when I skip a day or two.
I use a crosswave, and it's disgustingly effective at cleaning floors. It's basically a self cleaning Swifer wet jet.
I used it on floors that I mopped with a traditional mop twice right before, and the water was dark brown when I finished.
Robot vacuum has been a game changer for me. Highly recommended!
Clean the worst of it and let the rest be. I try to do a more thorough cleaning spring and fall.
If you're lucky enough to have a furnace, replace the filters monthly if you can. They sell them in multi packs. Buy the cheap ones and replace them often.
I don't wear shoes in the house and run an airfilter. Every friday or sunday, I do an hour of cleaning (if necessary). Keeps things extremely clean. If I make a mess, I immediately clean it up.
Roomba. OK, not exactly, but I have an offbrand bot that does touching up and my wife and I take turns doing a proper cleaning of the floors every couple weeks. It’s not perfect, but it’s presentable. Neither of us are going to dedicate too much time to keeping things perfect. Cleanliness is important, but take care that it doesn’t become an obsession at the cost of your other interests.
Robots do vacuuming and mopping at least once a week, some areas more often. I do basic cleaning of the kitchen regularly and more in depth cleaning occasionally. Bathrooms are about the same but less frequent. I find getting stoned really helpful for staying on top of cleaning, it's a much more enjoyable experience.
Robots
Put a large air cleaner in on high. Beat the couch cushions outside, shake down blankets outside, carpet wash the furniture and carpets. Scrub hvac vents and air handler ducts. Wet wipe your walls and base boards. Clean you dryer vents. Dust is everywhere. Light mop daily with a spray mop.
Change your HVAC filters every month until it gets better. If you don't have HVAC, get more air cleaners and stay on top filter replacements.
It'll take ages, but it'll get better.
Define your standard of clean. How much clutter do you want? How much dirt is OK?
Then break tasks up - decluttering, vacuuming, dusting, mopping, and schedule each as often as is needed.tp.mwet the above standards.
My personal standard is to do light vacuuming and decluttering every day. Dishes and cleaning kitchen +dining room at least daily, sometimes twice as needed. Bathroom cleaning and more extensive vacuuming every week. Dusting and mopping every couple weeks.
Most of my non-floor surface cleaning is done with method pink or 409 and microfiber cloths. A battery Dyson vacuum was a game changer and makes touch ups way easier; no wrangling with cords, just grab it off the wall charger and push it around for a few minutes hitting spots you can see dirt.
Nature's miracle is great for pet or kid messes, I use both the hardwood and carpet formulas.
ITT a bunch of dirty mofos.
You can sweep and mop one time to a quality that you shouldn't be able to see dirt and grit on your floor. Maybe a different story with pets... But I wouldn't keep a shedding creature in the house besides my wife, personally lol.
Do you just sweep with a broom? A good vacuum cleaner is a lot more thorough. And if you mopp right after there's a better chance to get most of the dust.
The other question is where the dirt is ultimately coming from. Most notably rom outside via air movement and shoes, but also consider shedded hair and skin from humans & pets, dropped food crumbs, lints from textiles and any hobbies/activities.
I like to avoid any "dust catcher" objects like carpets or rugs. In the end it's a tradeoff between how clean you want it to be and how much time you're willing to invest.
I clean the kitchen pretty thoroughly once per week after meal prepping. By thoroughly I mean do the dishes, wipe down the stovetop and counters, clean the sink with dish soap and a sponge, then sweep and mop. During the week I try to clean up small spills and such as I go and load the dishwasher after meals.
For the bathroom, I usually do once per month. Clean the counter, mirror, toilet top to bottom, and shower top to bottom. Sweep and mop.
Living spaces and bedroom I sweep/mop/vacuum once per month and clean tables as needed.
I hardly dust or clean windows. I maybe do that a couple times per year or if it's particularly filthy.
The general idea for me is to clean regularly and as needed so that nothing is really nasty at any given time. Anything else gets done roughly once per year or on move out.
i don't, its a nightmare
At some point the shame overcomes the laziness and then I clean it.
I bought a good vacuum cleaner and a steam cleaner. That and microfiber rags.
I usually just deep clean once a year and wash the floor multiple times over until it's pretty clean. Then I let my robot vacuum/mop keep it mostly clean twice a week the rest of the year. The robovac helps enforce a cleaner lifestyle by ensuring things aren't left out and about. The floors will never be perfectly clean though, just the nature of life~
As for everything else, I set reoccurring calendar tasks to space it out but I try to do one area per weekend. Keeps cleaning manageable but regular.
I've always considered paying for cleaning a little posh, but with children and both working full time it's an easy choice. We'd always prioritise other things than cleaning in our free time, so it wouldn't get done. It is also tax deductable where I live.
wait til' it gets bad enough to bug me, then clean.
We're almost there.
Wait... clean?
Part of the reason I downsized and bought a condo was to reduce the amount of time I spend doing "house" stuff. I just try to clean things as I go so that I don't have specific cleaning days.
Like the cleaning of a house... It Never Ends. Robot vacuum once every other day. Try to get to physical vacuuming of stairs etc. once a week along with cleaning toilets etc. Actual mopping of floors maybe once every two months? It is clean enough not clean.
How to create mental illness 101.
Change your air filter, check for dusty air ducts.
By not being OCD