Quick & Dirty Cleaning Tips For The Holidays

As any parent, party host/hostess, or homeowner has learned, the holiday season brings with it an awful lot of chores. There’s dinners to prepare, there’s guest rooms to set up, there’s presents to stash away, and it can all get a little overwhelming.

But fear not! No matter which of the major winter holidays you celebrate, there’s a lot of people out there with a lot of good advice to help get your house ready for the onslaught of guests, meals, and presents that the rest of this month will be bringing with it. Here’s some of the quickest and easiest ones we’ve pulled together to get your house ready for the big day (or days) with the least amount of effort possible!

To start with, you’re probably worried about long-term guests like your brother and his five kids or your in-laws or whoever is coming over. Setting up a guest bedroom can be a lengthy process if you let it become one, but at this point you’re better off just focusing on the important things. Porch.com has some advice on what to prioritize with guest bedrooms, mainly sticking with the sort of comforts you’d want at home (or at least in a hotel room) like a nightstand with a lamp, plenty of extra pillows and blankets, and enough room for their clothes. Think about the kind of things you’d want in your own bedroom, and provide that for your guests.

From there you might want to move on to cleaning the living room. Really, there’s not much else you have to do for a living room during the holidays that you wouldn’t have to do in there during other times of the year, so go ahead and focus on the important stuff. Wipe down your electronics cabinets, vacuum the carpets, get your throw rugs all together on the couches, and get the coffee and end tables as clean as possible. For more specifics, check out this pretty in-depth Pop Sugar list to get some ideas about even deeper cleaning if you’ve got the time!

Moving on, you’ll probably need to clean your kids’ rooms as well. This is where you can get a little help: there’s going to be presents right around the corner, and your kids are surely going to want to stay on the good side of whoever’s bringing them gifts! The best idea here is to help bring your child into the process and focus on what they can help with. Take a look at anything on their level and start there - toy boxes, dressers, smaller closets, and so on. Organized Home has a deeper look at what you can focus on to help them with and what will make their rooms look their best for the holiday season.

But that brings up a good question: what are you going to do about all those presents? They’re going to get in the way if you’re not careful, and you always run the risk of your family finding their gifts if you’re not clever enough! So where are you going to organize and hide your holiday presents? The Shelving Store has some good tips, but here’s the essentials: keep them in places your kids won’t want to look like your dresser drawers or the kitchen, try to stash the bigger stuff outside, and if you have space at a friend or neighbor’s house, call in some favors and keep your presents at their house so you know there’s no risk of being found!

These are probably the easiest places to start, and while it won’t solve all of your cleaning problems it’ll get you off to a perfect start before the big day comes!