- 1). Avoid clutter. Clutter collects dust. It's also visually messy. So even if your clutter passes the white-glove test, it still won't help your home look clean.
- 2
Look for ingenious "hide-it" furniture, like this one for shoes or laundry.
Don't over-furnish your home. Furniture needs dusting and occupies valuable open space. Everyday life brings enough stuff into your house: grocery bags, backpacks, shoes in the front hall, newspapers, mail—all of which take up square footage. Be strategic about your furniture, and try to buy pieces that have concealed storage, as opposed to open faces. Media cabinets are a good example. If you can find one with doors and drawers to hide all the "stuff" that finds its way into a media cabinet, all the better. - 3). Save nothing. There is simply no reason to save three years worth of magazines, old applesauce jars, pens that are out of ink, and invitations to parties that have come and gone. They may seem like small things, but they add up — and collect more dust.
- 4). Buy a dustbuster — a good one that is strong enough to suck up a Cheerio, for example. Use it after meals to catch crumbs that would otherwise travel from room to room on the bottom of someone's socks. Use it to suck up spider webs. Use it for quick counter-top pick-ups after preparing a meal or baking. Use it when your husband tracks in grass after mowing the lawn. A large upright of canister vacuum would work well, of course, but because it requires unraveling the cord and making a ton of noise, you might tend to overlook the crumbs until you have the time to use the "real" vacuum cleaner.
- 5). Another clean house technique is to spray the perimeter of the outside of your house with lemon-scented Pledge furniture polish. This seems to keep spiders out of the house (they don't like to cross the lemon scent). No spiders, means no spider webs, which means a cleaner house.
- 6). Use baby wipes for everything. They work great on laminate floors. They get spots out of upholstery. Use them to wipe down window sills and baseboards. The best part is that you don't feel like you're "cleaning" because you won't need to haul out the "cleaning" supplies.
- 7). Take off your shoes at the door. This will make an enormous difference in the cleanliness of your floors. Hold the members of your family to this house rule, and you'll never go back.
- 8). Do about five minutes of cleaning a day by picking up after yourself (and have your spouse and kids do the same). That way, you'll never feel overwhelmed by the tasks.
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