Keeping Your House Cleaner in 2015

By Maid Brigade of Northern Connecticut

The new year is almost here and with it comes resolution season.

Is one of your resolutions to keep your house cleaner?

Here are some tips to help you accomplish it.

Consider instituting this post-holiday rule: for every new item that arrives, three things have to go. Before anyone puts away presents, he or she must fill a minimum of three bags for donations. Do you have holiday decorations you didn’t use this year? Chances are you won’t them next year, either. These go in the donation pile. Go through your closets and cabinets and add things to the donation pile.

Get organized!

Label every box or bag you stash or store in the garage this year. Apply the same strategy throughout the house, starting with closets and drawers, and ending with neatly labeled storage boxes from each.

Along those same lines, invest in some baskets. Baskets in varying sizes are great repositories for toys, magazines, keys, remote controls, unopened mail, and other everyday items that tend to take over countertops and tabletops.

Managing the mail can also help keep you organized. Open it over a wastebasket or recycle bin so that anything unwanted quickly disappears. Put what you do keep in a neat pile – or a neat basket.

Every night, just before bedtime, do a walk-through of the house. Put newspapers in the recycle bin, put dishes in the dishwasher, hang up coats, and put away anything that wandered out during the day.

Now that you’ve decluttered and organized, cleaning should be much easier. Set aside an hour or so several days a week to tackle essential tasks.

For example, make Monday laundry day, Saturday bathroom day, and Sunday trash day. This ensures that nothing is overlooked, and it also spreads the work out into more manageable chunks of time throughout the week.

Remove shower scum as you go. A daily shower cleaner will keep shower and tub surfaces free of soap scum, mildew stains, and hard-water deposits. Enlist everyone in the household to mist the surfaces immediately after they shower, while the walls are still wet and warm.

You can also vacuum on the run. A small, hand-held cordless vacuum makes quick pickup a snap. Cleaning up a mess as soon as it happens is much more efficient – and will save you from dealing with bigger headaches down the road.

Need some help around the house? Give Maid Brigade of Central Connecticut a call at 860-645-6243 and we’ll help you out.