Cleaning your home is a necessary evil. It keeps bacteria and germs at bay, helping to prevent the spread of infections amongst you and your family; tidying up and putting things away also helps to prevent potential accidents from happening in the home. Not to mention that a clean and tidy home helps you to stay organised in all other areas of your life too! However, despite its necessity, cleaning is not on the top of most people’s lists when they have some free time.
If you are the kind of person who would rather be doing anything other than cleaning your home, why not make 2016 the year that you introduce a few new habits? We’ve come up with four cleaning resolutions for the New Year that will help you to keep on top of things, and perhaps even enjoy cleaning!
1) Clean as you go: The best habit that you can adopt is to clean as you go. This means wiping up spills as soon as they happen, washing pots and pans straight after use, and loading the dishwasher or washing the dishes as soon as possible after eating. Leaving plates and cups on the worktop makes your kitchen look messy, encourages bacteria to breed, and turns ‘loading the dishwasher’ into a big job that you keep putting off. Get into the habit of doing smaller jobs as you go, and they won’t build up into big, unmanageable ones!
2) Make oven cleaning easier: No one likes cleaning the oven, and those who say they do are lying! It’s inevitable that food and grease will spill over and build up in your oven; and every time you use it that food will get cooked onto the shelves even more. For starters, you can make life easier for yourself by placing a silicone oven liner in the bottom of your oven to catch spills and drips – this can be removed and cleaned easily once a week. Secondly, when you’re cleaning the silicone sheet, slip the shelves out and soak them in warm soapy water before gently scrubbing them with a wire sponge. Doing both of these things prevents the need for an annual oven scrub-down.
3) Let your cleaning products do the work: If you’re using the right products, and using them properly, you shouldn’t need to use every ounce of elbow grease you have to scrub things clean! Spray the mildew remover onto your tiles, or the grease remover onto your hob, and leave it to do its job for a good few minutes. When you come back to
it, it should be a case of just wiping the dirt away and rinsing the area with clean water.
4) Check your fridge regularly: You know that smell that hits you every time you open the fridge door? It’s probably caused by some lingering, forgotten-about food, or a spillage that never got wiped up properly. Check your fridge at least once a week, throwing out any food that has seen better days, and giving the shelves a quick wipe down with an antibacterial wipe. Work it into your routine whenever you’re taking the rubbish out; before you tie the bin bag up, glance in the fridge and throw out any unsavoury items that aren’t worth eating. This is a good way to keep on top of things and prevent food waste too.
