3 Hacks to Keep Your Home Effortlessly Tidy
Maintaining a clean home is TOUGH. You work hard all week, only to wake up on Saturday morning to see your kitchen sink overflowing with dishes, clothes scattered around your bedroom, and a mysterious sticky substance on your stovetop.
Great, it’s finally the weekend and now you have to spend hours cleaning.
This was me. I struggled so much to keep up with the little things. And if someone messaged me to say they were in town and wanted to drop by, I PANICKED. How was I going to get my home looking acceptable to other humans in just 15 minutes?!
It was after one of these panic-cleans that I realized I needed to make a change. So I did. These are the 3 habits that helped me finally master the art of maintaining a clean home with as little effort as possible.
1. The “Leave the room” tidy up
Every time you leave the room, do a quick tidy up. Fold a blanket, rearrange the items on the coffee tables, pick up clothes from the ground, or wipe down the counters. This should take no more than 1 minute to do.
Why does it work? If you do these small things every time you leave a room, you never give it a chance to become a mess. Now every time you enter a room it’s already clean. It’s such a great feeling of tranquility to enter a room with a nicely folded blanket or a kitchen with sparkling counters.
2. The “10-minute” timer
Every evening set a 10-minute timer on your phone and challenge yourself to see how much cleaning you can get down before the timer goes off. You’ll be shocked at what you can accomplish in this short time. Do all of the dishes, wipe down counters, put back the outfits that you didn’t end up wearing, and put away anything that shouldn’t be sitting out.
Why does it work? There are many different chores that need to be done daily to prevent them from piling up, such as doing the dishes and putting away items that don’t belong. It can be overwhelming to think about how you’re going to accomplish so many different things, making it easy to procrastinate and put it off until your home is an absolute disaster. But what we don’t realize is that many of these things take very little time to do!
It’s easier to say yes to something that you don’t want to do when there’s a short time limit on it. The 10-minute timer trick makes it easier to just get started in the first place. And since many of them don’t take more than a few minutes each, when they’re stacked together with a time limit you can often accomplish the majority of them before the timer buzzes!
3. Minimize the stuff on display
Do you ever look at your kitchen counters or your office desk and feel like they’re cluttered? When you minimize the number of things on display, your space will automatically look cleaner. Instead of having all of the items that you use out on display, put them right inside a cabinet or drawer that’s easy to get to.
Why does it work? Our minds often associated empty space with being clean and tidy. Despite your best efforts to arrange a group of commonly used items in a corner to look cute and organized, putting them away will make the space look much cleaner and tidier.
Take a look at the photos below. In the before picture, everything had a place, but there were just too many things so it looked cluttered instead of tidy. In the after photo, they moved most of the items to a cupboard and now the kitchen looks sparkling clean.
Since turning these 3 hacks into habits, my home always looks and feels clean. I feel happier when I get up in the morning and come out to a tidy kitchen and living room, and I feel more peaceful when I relax in a space that’s clean. And most importantly, when a last-minute visitor announces their impending arrival, I no longer panic and instead take a quick walk around to make sure everything is in its place and maybe do a quick Swiffer for any dust. It’s delightful living this way, and I hope you too can find peace and joy in these easy cleaning habits.
