Have you ever spent hours cleaning your house, looked around afterward, and somehow still felt like it wasn’t clean? Or maybe you’re looking around right now thinking, I don’t even know where to start.
One of the biggest misconceptions about keeping a clean home is that everything needs to be done at once. It doesn’t. A manageable home really comes down to three things: resetting, maintaining and deep cleaning.
Start With the Reset
Before worrying about baseboards, ceiling fans or the inside of your oven, start with what is making your home feel chaotic. Pick up the clutter. Take dishes to the kitchen. Throw away trash. Put dirty clothes in the hamper. Clear the counters and put things back where they belong.
That’s your reset.
It isn’t necessarily cleaning yet. You’re creating a space that can be cleaned. Try not to bounce from room to room. It’s easy to carry something into the bedroom, notice the laundry, start that, walk through the kitchen, notice the dishes and suddenly have five unfinished projects. Complete one area before moving to the next.
Create a Rhythm
Once your home has been reset, maintaining it becomes much easier. Focus regularly on the areas that make the biggest difference in how your home feels: usually the kitchen, bathrooms, floors and main living areas.
Then, give your home a simple closing shift each night. Load the dishwasher. Wipe the counters. Put the living room back together. Pick up what accumulated throughout the day. Ten or fifteen minutes can make a tremendous difference in what you wake up to tomorrow. Your home doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs a rhythm.
Deep Cleaning Is a Different Job
Regular cleaning and deep cleaning aren’t the same thing. Your routine cleaning may include toilets, counters, dusting, vacuuming and mopping. Deep cleaning includes the things that don’t necessarily need attention every week: baseboards, doors, trim, vents, light fixtures, cabinet fronts and other commonly forgotten areas.
Trying to do all of that every time you clean is exhausting. Instead, rotate those tasks. A few deeper items at a time can keep the entire home maintained without sacrificing a whole weekend to cleaning.
Let Your Routine Work for You
This is actually the philosophy we use at R.L. Cleaning. We don’t expect a homeowner to maintain a picture-perfect house between visits. You live there. There are kids, pets, work schedules, meals, laundry and weeks when the routine simply falls apart. Instead, we encourage homeowners to find a rhythm.
You help us with the reset, and we help you keep the home maintained and deep cleaned.
That means putting away personal belongings and everyday clutter when you can, while your cleaning routine takes care of the actual cleaning and the deeper tasks that are much harder to stay on top of.
We’ve even begun implementing this philosophy into our home cleaning plan: helping homeowners understand what should be done daily, weekly, monthly and seasonally so there is always a place to start.
Because the goal isn’t to spend your life cleaning your house. The goal is to create a routine that allows you to enjoy living in it. And when life gets busy and that routine falls apart? You don’t have to start over.
Reset what you can, return to your rhythm, and keep going.
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