Know how to clean

Just like with laundry, some high school grads haven’t learned about the joy of cleaning.

Okay, so most people hate cleaning. I, on the other hand, love it!

For me, cleaning is a form of stress relief. During exam time my room was always spotless. The reason being, a clean and organized environment calms me. If there is dirt and clutter everywhere, I have trouble focusing on what needs to be done.

Cleaning comes down to two areas: dirt and organization.

Dirt:

Dirt is the obvious part of cleaning. Clean it.

Cleaning is easy if you have a routine. If you’re like me (crazy) you clean every day when you get home. Now, to be fair, it’s not like I’m cleaning the house from top to bottom. By cleaning any mess I make every day, it really takes only a few minutes to tidy up each day and I never have to spend an hour or so during the week to do a huge clean up (just because I don’t have to, doesn’t mean I don’t do it by choice!).

A healthy (not crazy) routine is of course to clean your house once a week.

Dust/wipe all of your surfaces, vacuum the carpets, sweep the floor, Windex the windows and mirrors and make sure your dishes are all clean and put away. It’s that simple.

You don’t need a ton of supplies either:

-Vacuum

- Broom with dustpan

- Mop and bucket

- Cloth

- Windex

-Surface cleaning spray (Lysol) / cleaning solution

-Dishwasher / dish soap, sponge and drying rack

-The Mr. Clean magic eraser works great in bathrooms!

Forget the rest of the fancy powders, scrubs and potions, clean is clean and the newest ‘super elixir’ can’t get your floor any cleaner. If you’re on good terms with your roommates you might want to create a cleaning schedule to divide up the tasks.

*Note: Create it together, not like the comment on this post…it will not go over well if the schedule appears without everyone’s input.

Organization:

There are some people (i.e. my college roommate) who, every time they start cleaning their room, seem to feel like it gets messier as they move their clutter from one place to another while ‘cleaning’. This is simply because they are unorganized. Each object in your house needs a specific space to belong. If you don’t have a specific space, the object floats around, collecting more lost objects, until your floor is cleaned off and your bed disappears under a pile of junk that you have set aside as you cleaned to deal with once you’ve finished.

If you read my tax post you have some idea what to do with that junk. TOSS IT!

The truth is, disorganization might not be dirty, but it is messy.

You can’t see the dirt if your stuff is covering it up. Alternately, you can’t see how clean your house is if your stuff is all over those wiped surfaces, vacuumed carpets and swept floors.

I have no idea where I got my ‘clean gene’ from, it certainly wasn’t inherited.

When we were younger my brother had a sign on his bedroom door that read:

‘The floor is the biggest shelf in the room.”

For years I couldn’t tell you what colour his carpet was.

Thankfully, we never shared a room.