A Clean Home is a Happy Home
For some people, keeping the apartment clean is a matter of fact. For others, it takes a bit of extra commitment. No matter which camp you fall into, it is possible to keep your home tidy if you’re willing to shape new habits. If you start following through on a few simple tasks on a daily basis, you won’t have to rush around doing a deep-cleaning the next time someone comes over for dinner. We’ve compiled a list of the most helpful habits for keeping your home clean at all times—without spending an entire afternoon frantically cleaning:
- Make your bed. Simple enough, and yet many people roll out of bed and leave it that way for the day. Leaving your bed unmade not only makes your entire room look sloppy, it could tempt you to let junk pile up there. Even worse, if you’re exhausted after a long day of work, you might transfer that junk to the floor in order to make your bed instantly accessible. Commit to making your bed every morning—it will only take a few minutes. You can make this goal more achievable by subtracting a surplus of throw pillows and other stuff that turns bed-making into a long process.
- Put away laundry. Whether you’re stripping off your outfit and chucking it on the floor or bringing a fresh basket of laundry upstairs and letting it sit, not properly dealing with laundry is perhaps one of the biggest contributors to clutter. Throwing dirty laundry on the floor just creates a new problem to deal with later—better to stick it right in the hamper. And when it comes to putting away clean laundry, just keep reminding yourself that the longer it sits, the more wrinkles form. Nobody enjoys ironing.
- Sort through junk mail. Junk mail can pile up on the kitchen counter, the office desk, and the hallway table if you don’t deal with it immediately. The trick to taking care of junk mail is creating a filing system that allows you to immediately determine if a piece of mail is important (and put it away) or trash (and chuck it).
- Create a landing pad. Especially if you have kids, there’s a tendency to let stuff accumulate around the front door: shoes, backpacks, lunch bags. This is probably inevitable if you have little ones at home, but you can make the entryway more organized. Set up a type of “landing pad” with baskets or cubbies for each child or each type of item so that they can still drop them when they walk into the apartment, just in an orderly fashion.
- Do the dishes. Like junk mail and dirty laundry, dishes will stack up in the sink if you let them go. Decide to wash them right away after every meal, and you won’t have to deal with this problem. You’ll also be staving off the ants and germs that come with piles of yucky dishes, and thus protecting your family.
