Whether you hate it, love it, or love to hate it, cleaning is an inescapable part of living life!
But we all have our own ways of keeping our spaces clean or organizing our clutter to work for us.
Whether you swear by minimizing clutter and keeping only your essentials or throwing yourself into an all-day clean periodically, here are some cleaning hacks we think everyone should know.
Divide and conquer
This may not seem like a hack, but once you get in the groove you won’t be able to clean any other way!
Instead of storing up all your cleaning for a free day or the weekend, spread your cleaning out over the week to make it more palatable. Whether you enjoy cleaning and find it therapeutic or like to get it out of the way as soon as possible, getting some quick cleaning done makes everything better.
Make yourself a cleaning schedule with quick wins you can get done in a few minutes. Whether it’s vacuuming one room or rinsing the sink, cleaning this way gives the mess no time to build up!
Use
a squeegee on glass shower screens
Glass shower doors may be better at keeping drips off your bathroom floor, but these benefits don’t feel worth it when you’re struggling to restore the glass to its shiny, spotless presence.
Over time, glass shower screens can become permanently damaged by hard water and soap buildup. That’s why the best way to approach this cleaning is through prevention rather than cure.
Maintain your glass shower screens just by adding a squeegee to your shower routine. Once you’re done in the shower, just use a squeegee to wipe down the glass. It only takes seconds, but it dramatically reduces the likelihood of hard-to-budge water stains and makes cleaning much more painless.
Don’t
shy away from double duty
While having the right cleaning products and tools on your shelf is the only way to really keep up with cleaning your spaces, a lot of common household items double up as cleaning superheroes.
Our favorite hacks involve tongs and gardening gloves.
Tongs are a great tool when it comes to cleaning your window blinds. Just tie rags onto each prong and clamp down on the blade to wipe down both sides simultaneously.
Love decorating your home with ornaments and mementos but hate dusting them down? Just wear some cotton garden gloves and run your fingers over your knick-knacks. Sprinkle some cleaning solution onto the gloves for a more thorough job. It’s that easy!
Microfiber
cloth is your friend
Rags and dusters may be go-tos in your cleaning routine, but here’s why microfiber cloth beats them all.
Instead of just spreading the dust around, microfiber draws and holds onto dust because of its electrostatic charge. It’s absorbent and gentle on your surfaces and it also uses less water and chemicals than most other cloths.
Microfiber cloth can clean most rooms in your home from your bathroom and kitchen countertops to your electronics and wooden furniture.
The cherry on top? It’s also more economic and eco-friendly than stocking up on disposable wipes. Just invest in some machine-washable microfiber products and you’ll be reaching for them over and over again.
Stock
up on vinegar
Almost every home cleaning solution includes vinegar in the recipe and there’s a good reason for it.
The acetic acid of vinegar is a natural disinfectant that kills nasty germs. Your floors, kitchen sink, refrigerator, and even your garbage can are just a few things that can be cleaned out with white vinegar in your arsenal.
Most homemade cleaning solutions recommend using equal parts water to vinegar so you get all the good parts of this acid without having to deal with the damage it can cause by coming on too strong.
The vinegar smell also dissipates pretty quickly or can be diluted with some lemon peels, so you don’t need to worry about getting the vinegar stench out of your clean home.
What are your personal favorite cleaning hacks you swear by? Let us know in the comments!