It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get your house in order. These five experts share their best tips, tricks, and techniques to clean and tidy your home, as well as how to keep it organized.
When you sit back and really take a long look at your house, you realize that it could do with some sprucing up. When was the last time you dusted in the corners and the high spots? Couldn’t this room be straightened out to make everything easier? How about adding a little aesthetic comfort to make it more liveable?
The internet is full of blogs and YouTube channels where everyday folks and experts share household hacks to manage a home. They’ll show you how to clean and organize, they’ll give downloadable checklists, they’ll share DIY instructions. Crank up a playlist and get cleaning.
1. The Order Expert (Web): Workbook to Figure Things Out Before You Start
Rashelle Isip, a professional organizer and productivity consultant in New York, believes that your personality doesn’t inherently make you organized or disorganized. Instead, she says organization is a skill that anyone can learn and shares how to go about it.
On her blog The Order Expert, Isip shares her knowledge about how to organize your home (and your life). Cluttered workspaces and home often lead to disorganized thoughts and a feeling of being overwhelmed, which is part of the productivity tips she offers.
She has written posts on every type of household cleaning and organizing you can think of, such as how to clean a garage, how to organize a drawer, how to declutter a closet, and so on.
A good starting point is to download her free guide on the three smart steps to organize your home. You’ll need to sign up to access this, but you can opt out of getting newsletters. It’s like a workbook, in which Isip first makes you organize your thoughts about the problems with your space and how to address them.
It’s just 11 pages with only three of them being interactive but go through the exercise. This will end up becoming a guide you can use for all future house-cleaning and organizing projects.
2. Clean My Space (Web, YouTube): Tips From a Professional Cleaner
Melissa Maker hosts the Clean My Space YouTube channel, and also runs a professional cleaning service. You can watch her videos or head to the website for articles about the same things, depending on how you like to learn.
Maker recently went viral with her “3 Wave System” of cleaning fast and effectively. In it, she explains how to break down the big task of cleaning a room into smaller bite-sized tasks. It’s a common productivity technique to get things done, which she applies in a practical way to declutter, organize, and clean any room in any house.
The website divides household chores into categories like home cleaning, cleaning routines, decluttering and organizing, and products and tools. You’ll find several DIY substitutes to make cleaning products if you can’t get something off the shelf.
Watch: Clean My Space on YouTube
3. Unexpectedly Domestic (Web): Readymade Checklists to Clean Regularly
Rebecca covers a wide range of topics at her blog, Unexpectedly Domestic, including household cleaning, budget and finance management, and meal planning. Across these various topics, her checklists to get things done are the stand-out feature.
You’ll need to sign up for the newsletter to get access to the checklists. For household cleaning, she offers six lists:
- Get your home organized toolkit
- Daily tidy checklist
- Blank weekly checklist
- Spring cleaning checklist
- Fall cleaning checklist
- Cleaning supplies
For each list, you will find an accompanying article that talks about how best to put it into practice. The “Get your home organized toolkit” is the largest of these, with tips on decluttering your home by getting rid of 135 things.
Apart from the lists, check out Unexpectedly Domestic’s section for cleaning and decluttering. Rebecca shares several techniques and tips to simplify home organization and upkeep. And if you like what you find here, the rest of the blog is pretty good too.
4. The Simply Organized Home (Web): 5-Day Course to a Clean Home
Some people think cleaning and organizing one’s home is a monumental task that will never end. Kaitlin Stearns wants to bust such myths by showing you how to get a clean home in five days.
Sign up for the email course to get a new set of tasks every day, complete with free printables, tips and tricks, and other resources. At the end of the fifth day, your home will be spic and span.
At the Simply Organized Home blog, Stearns shares several household hacks to make it easier to clean and organize your kitchen, living room, bathroom, and everything else. It largely divides the posts into organizing, decluttering, home management, and home decor, with a mix of guides, DIY tips, and other articles.
Make sure you also check out the Resources section. Apart from the 5-day course, this also has Stearns’ “home management toolbox,” which is a collection of cleaning and organizing tools she recommends. And you can sign up for the newsletter to get access to her library of free printables.
5. The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Declutter Your Home (Web)
Dumpster rental company Budget Dumpster isn’t where you’d expect to find one of the best decluttering guides on the internet. But that’s exactly what you get with The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Declutter Your Home. It’s an aptly-titled piece full of expert advice and logical step-by-step instructions.
You’ve probably heard of many decluttering experts such as Marie Kondo, Peter Walsh, Joshua Decker, and Davon Parks. This article rounds up salient advice from all these professional cleaners as well as several others. It then applies those tips in the appropriate section, making it easier to act upon them.
The guide breaks the cleaning process into decluttering methods and tips, room-by-room organization, and staying decluttered. Even though it’s a long read, it clarifies the whole idea of home cleanliness and organization in your head, once and for all.
Let Robots Clean for You
With these guides and experts, you’ll have everything put in its proper place and your house looking neat in no time. But things are slowly getting even easier, as you don’t have to do many of these tasks. From vacuuming the floors to cleaning your windows, these robots will do the chores for you.
Read the full article: 5 Household Experts Teach You How to Clean and Organize Your Home