At times, cleaning can seem a lot harder than it has to be. You don’t have to spend hours every single day maintaining your clean house. With proper planning and organization, you can keep your home clean and guest-ready at all times.

Clean the Dirtiest Thing Last. Work top to bottom, inside toward the center, or from the right in a clockwise motion from your stove to always clean the dirtiest areas last in your home. This will help avoid spreading dirt and grease around and having to use more cleaning supplies such as sponges and cloths.

Sanitize Sinks, Sponges and Toilets. These things get super dirty. Sponges and sinks can sometimes be dirtier than your toilets. Can you believe that? It’s important to sanitize your sink each day. Use a cleaner that gets rid of bacteria such as bleach, or a commercial cleaner that gets rid of germs. In addition, sanitize your sponge by cleaning well with the cleaner, then zapping it in the microwave. For your toilet, you can use flat soft drinks to dissolve dirt and lose the worry about your dog drinking out of the pot. Just pour flat soda (or buy super cheap soda) into the bowl and let soak overnight. Then in the morning, scrub and flush away the germs.

Use an Oven Liner. The oven gets dirty because when you bake items they often drip or splatter. If you put a non-stick liner in the bottom of your oven you can easily wipe it out as you clean up the kitchen each evening after dinner. Spending one minute right now wiping out the spills will save you hours later trying to get off burnt-on food.

Keep Your Bedroom Comfortable. It can be very hard to sleep in a mess room. If you train yourself and everyone else to make the bed first thing, the room will automatically feel cleaner and more restful.

Basket It! Take five minutes to circle the house with a basket, putting anything that doesn’t belong in the room inside the basket. Go through twice, so you can also put the stuff away after collecting it. This can cut down on clutter in a big way. Want to teach kids to pick up their belongings? Have a lost and found and charge for retrieval.

Create a Home for Everything. Organization will help tremendously. If everything has a home, such as shoes, coats, umbrellas, books and so forth, there will be a lot less clutter. Create homes for things with baskets, cubbies and shelving.

Use Phone Time Wisely. If your mom or best friend calls, use the time in a productive manner. Get a headset so that you have your hands free and keep moving during the entire call cleaning anything that’s dirty or folding laundry.

Cleaning doesn’t have to take that much time out of your day if you keep cleaning as you go, and teach your family to do the same. Having a home for each thing you own, and a logical place to store things, will also help. Creating procedures and scheduling times to do deep cleaning will also make a huge difference.

Members to ListPlanIt will find the lists they need to put their home in order in Home Management.  Not yet a member?  Join today and get your home and family organized.