Keeping Up with Clean

You’ve scoured and vacuumed and washed and scrubbed your home from top to bottom, and now you want it to stay that way. Maintaining a clean home can seem like an arduous task, but with a few simple steps, it’ll take no time before you’ve figured out a daily routine!

By maintaining the clean and clutter in your home and office, it’s easier to establish an orderly environment. And you don’t have to spend hours a day cleaning.

Tidy Tasks

Make it a habit to clean as your go. Remember the saying, “a place for everything and everything in its place?” This applies to keeping your home tidy.
For example, start by taking a few minutes at the end of each activity to put items back where they belong. Having accessible storage is a great way to keep your space clean.

Drawers, shelves, baskets and clear storage bins can help make putting things away in their proper place so much easier.

Sanity Saver

Make a schedule to establish a cleaning agenda, and focus on only one or two tasks per day.

If you share the space with your family or roommates, sit down and make a schedule that involves everyone. It’s a positive way to make everyone accountable for cleaning up after themselves.

Having a designated cleaning time frame means there are set days to do particular housekeeping tasks.

For example:

• Monday: Vacuum living room and bedrooms
• Tuesday: Wipe down bathroom, do laundry
• Wednesday: Pay bills, make grocery shopping list
• Thursday: Go grocery shopping, dust and clean windows/mirrors
• Friday: Spray down bathtub, wipe down kitchen counters
• Saturday: Deep clean the house

The Dirty Truth

Remember, not everyone will have the same standards of cleanliness. What you think is clean may still be an utter mess to someone else. Talk about your standards of cleanliness and create a housekeeping schedule as per those guidelines.
A few minutes a day may be the only thing keeping you from maintaining a clean and clutter-free household!

Cleaning Power

Baking soda, vinegar and lemon. Cleaning with these three key ingredients is like taking the powers of three separate superheroes and combining them into one great big environmentally friendly caped crusader.

It is, literally, the world’s worst kept secret: Basic cleaning 101.

The combination of baking soda, vinegar and lemon is the ultimate team of cleaning green. These three products have so many things going for them: First, the fact that they’re non-toxic is a big positive. They can clean almost anything and everything, and each of these items are wallet friendly; they’re super inexpensive.

By themselves, each item has a strength of its own, but together, the possibilities are immense!

Baking Soda

Baking soda is probably the most diverse product of the three. Also known as bicarbonate, baking soda can be used everywhere; throughout the house and outdoors, to remove and keep away odours, scrub out stains without scratching the surface and even clean-up lawn furniture. It can also be used for cooking or baking, as the name suggests.

Lemon

Lemons are a great-smelling, non-toxic way to clean your home. Dilute fresh lemon juice with water in a spray bottle for an air freshener, or to clean countertops, walls and toilets. Lemon can be used to deodorise and clean the dishwasher, shower doors, and shine chrome faucets.

Vinegar

Vinegar is a natural, powerful and cheap option for cleaning up. Place a bowl of vinegar in a room overnight to get rid of any unpleasant odours. Clean windows with a mixture of vinegar and water, remove persistent stains from clothing, make your brights brighter in the wash.

Three-In-One

People were cleaning with these ingredients long before the fancy, sometimes harsh brand-name cleaning products were invented. With the power of cleaning staples like baking soda, lemon and vinegar, you are able to clean the whole house effectively and safely.

Kitchen/Bathroom Sink Cleaner and Deodoriser

• Sprinkle ½ cup baking soda in and around the drain
• Pour ½ cup vinegar down the drain
• Squeeze juice from ½ lemon into drain
• Let hot water rinse the ingredients for about one minute

Cleaning with these items could save you money. And your house will smell fresh because of it!

Removing toxic cleaning products to spring clean your home is the first step to spring green cleaning. Picking up environmentally friendly cleaning products goes a long way to ensure a fresh home environment. Eliminating toxic chemicals around your house is proven to help you sleep and concentrate better, as well as breathe cleaner air.

It may be the one thing in your house that everyone absolutely needs, absolutely uses every day and absolutely hates to clean — the toilet. And since the business that takes place on it can be nasty, you always want to do the best job sanitizing and disinfecting, you resort to heavy duty cleaners and chemicals to get the job done. But you don’t have to.

One of the problems with indoor carpet is that they are the perfect breeding ground for mites, moulds and dust. Vacuuming is your first line of defence and should be done regularly with a decent model.

Cutting boards. Foul smelling dish cloths. Stopping the spread of germs.

It is really important to clean not just so a space looks good, but so that it doesn’t make you sick, and so it doesn’t smell. And this is a place where nature really does shine.

You probably know by now that vinegar makes an excellent non-toxic cleaner. But you might not have realized how many things can be cleaned with this cheap and plentiful substance.

Consumers and businesses alike are now turning to green products so they can ensure they are doing their bit for the environment. However, there is still little regulation over some terms such as eco-friendly, so how do you know how green the product you intend buying is? This article will help to provide a guide.

The holidays present a whole slew of cleanup challenges:  sap from your Christmas tree, salt from the roads tracked in my merry guests, spilled wine from really merry guests — these are just a few of the holiday problems that can present themselves. Plus, you want the place to smell good, look good, all without hurting environment.

Keeping your house clean can be a challenge, what with kids, pets, and the way the Great Outdoors insists on making it indoors, and onto your floors. Even tougher is keeping your house clean while not completely destroying your hands.