Practical Household Tips and Tricks for a Clean and Tidy Home

Staying clean and organized can be a job and a half! Keeping up with everyday cleaning tasks is tough, and once you start drifting behind, you can really fall back in your household schedule.

When you do, that clutter and dust just piles up, and after a while, it can start to seem like a hopeless case. These quick household tips will help you to minimize your time and effort and maximize your results in every room of your house!

Living Room or Media Room

This is a difficult spot in your house to keep clean because it’s so central. Clutter accumulates regularly from a lot of different sources. These tips will help you get things back under control. For the best results, get everyone in your household onboard with your new cleaning and organizing tactics!

• Clear the clutter first. Especially if you have kids, all kinds of random items are going to pile up in the living room. Grab a laundry basket or a large plastic bin and start by collecting all the loose random items. Get that out of the way and redistribute it all later.

• Get a magazine rack or newspaper stand, but make sure you don’t keep anything in there for too long. The moment you let that get out of hand, you will just end up with heaps of magazines you will “go through later” but never do. After you have gone through them, clip out anything you want to save and recycle the rest.

• If you don’t already have one, get a basket for your remote controls so they stop getting lost behind the couch or under cushions.

• Come up with a clever organizing system for your multimedia. One great way to condense your collection of DVDs and CDs is by purchasing those booklets you can store the discs in. Put the original boxes in storage. You will free up so much space.

• Have houseplants with dusty leaves? Grab a banana and eat it and keep the skin. Use the skin to clean the leaves. The dust will stick right to it, and the juice is healthy for the plants.

• Want to shine up your wood with a quick and easy home mixture? Never mind furniture polish. Just grab some olive oil and lemon juice and mix them in a 2:1 ratio. Go over your wood surfaces with it and your furniture will shine.

• If you look inside your vases and find they are full of dirt, you can clean them out by filling them with vinegar. Add a handful of dry rise, and swish the vases around. Pour everything out, and they should be significantly cleaner inside. A very cool little trick.

• Put cork on the bottoms of heavy vases and other objects that you regularly have to clean under. Doing this will prevent these items from gouging your floor, which will in turn prevent damage and make your floors easier to clean.

• Keep a dust cloth in a handy spot in your living room where you can grab it in an instant. If you regularly wipe down surfaces when you notice dust building up on them, you will have a much easier time keeping everything under control.

Kitchen

Keeping the kitchen clean and tidy is even harder than keeping the living room or media center in order! But if you do, it pays off in terms of time saved. It’s faster and easier to prepare meals, and you can spend more time relaxing and savoring the results. We also have a whole host of other kitchen storage and organizing tips to make life easier for you.

• Keep your cling film in the fridge. A lot of people find it much more cooperative and easier to use when it is cold.
•  Grease buildup on top of your cabinets? You need to keep the tops of your cabinets clean, but thankfully you don’t have to look at them. That makes this an easy problem to solve. If you line the tops of your cabinets with newspaper, you can protect them from grease.

• Fingerprints all over your stainless steel appliances? Put a little baby oil on a clean, soft cloth, and run it over the surfaces. Those prints should lift right off.
•  Use magnets to give yourself some extra storage space. How? Metallic spice jars and utensils can both stick to magnets. You can then use the magnets to stick them to the side of your fridge. It looks odd, but there is no denying it is super handy. Very clever approach to keeping everything organized and in reach!

•  Put plastic containers with lids inside your drawers, or use plastic drawer dividers. These will create handy pockets of space for different items.

•  Grab two buckets when it is time to clean your floors. Put clean water in one, and use the other to drain the dirty water into. I know this one is so simple as to be obvious, but … well, it wasn’t obvious to me. I never in a million years would have thought to just double up on buckets.

•  Get one of those awesome cutting boards which are designed to fit over top of your sink. This frees up counter space; actually, in a sense it extends your counter space! Since you are fitting it over the sink, the sink can also catch anything which falls through, which saves you from making a mess of things when you are cutting.

• Turn false drawers into real drawers. This tutorial is awesome! You know those fake drawers that most kitchen cabinets include which don’t open and don’t offer you any space at all—they just look cute from the outside? This tutorial teaches you how you can install real, working drawers in their place and capitalize on that underutilized space.