How to *Actually* Keep Your House Clean

How to *Actually* Keep Your House Clean Blog Post

Hi Friends! Today I want to tackle a BIG topic – keeping your house clean. We’re deep into spring cleaning season at this point and I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about ways to *actually* keep my house in order for more than a day after a deep cleaning sesh. Because isn’t it the worst when you spend an entire day (or even an entire weekend) cleaning your house, only for it to be destroyed like three days later? I think it is, and to be honest, I’m sick of it.

This is what led me to create this handy little guide for each room in the house. You’ll still have to have a good deep cleaning day every once in a while, but these quick tips will help keep things a bit tidier on a day-to-day basis. I know things like this are much easier said than done because I’m still trying to implement all of the suggestions and tips below in my own life, but I figured, if I’m struggling with this, y’all probably are too.

I broke everything down by room because I think each room kind of has different needs. And maybe you’re pretty good at keeping up with your bedroom, but the kitchen is a sore spot. This way you can tackle each room as its own thing. It all feels more approachable to me this way. OK, I hope this helps and please let me know if you have any other tried and true tips you rely on for keeping your house clean!

Brighton Keller Bedroom 1

Keeping The Bedroom Clean

For me, the biggest pain point in my bedroom is clothes. So I figure, if I can come up with a better system to manage  my clothes slash laundry, my room will already be 100x better off. First things first, get a dirty clothes hamper. Put it in your closet or somewhere in your bedroom (maybe in your bathroom if you have an ensuite) and use it. I like to play a little game with myself to keep clothes off the floor – if I make it through a week without walking into my room and seeing dirty clothes on the floor, I get to reward myself in some way. It might sound weird, but it works.

Next, you have to deal with the clothes that aren’t dirty but maybe you tried on and didn’t wear, or you wore them but they don’t need to be washed yet. I have found myself spending as much as an hour at the end of the week going through this pile of clothes and hanging stuff back up. And you know what? I HATE doing it this way. It just feels totally inefficient. Actually hanging these things back up right away after taking them off saves SO much time and my room stays clean throughout the week instead of only looking good for a few days.

So now that we’ve tackled clothes, one of the other big issues in bedrooms can be clutter. For me, my bedroom tends to be the place I set things down. Know what I mean? It’s like a catch-all area. I buy something, bring it into the house and put it in my room. I’m trying really hard to break this habit, but sometimes it’s just inevitable. That said, keeping your bedroom as simplified as possible will make it feel so much more clean on a daily basis

Keeping The Kitchen Clean

As much as I love a good organized fridge and pantry (kitchen organization is seriously a passion of mine), and I do think those things are very important, I feel like the kitchen is more about cleaning and the products you use than it is about organization. Like, I want things to be organized so it looks nice, but it has to be clean to function well. I mean, the kitchen is probably the number one space in the house where you don’t want buildup to happen, right? For example, dishes. When dishes pile up in the sink, no one is happy.

Now, I live with two roommates, so that makes a huge difference in the number of dishes we have, but whether you live alone or with a family, I recommend implementing a nightly dish check. Before turning off all the lights for the night and heading to bed, take a look at your sink and the surrounding area. Are there dishes laying around? Deal with them before going to bed! My favorite time to run the dishwasher is at night because then I wake up to all my dishes being clean and it’s just a better way to start the day than with a sink full of dirty dishes with tons of food dried onto them.

And speaking of washing the dishes, the detergent you use to clean them is SO important. Actually, all the products you use to clean your kitchen slash house are super important. But for dishes, we’ve been using Cascade pure essentials. We always used Cascade before, but because me and the roommates are trying to use more household cleaning products we can feel good about, we made the switch to Cascade‘s new pure essentials line. It’s infused with biobased ingredients and has a simplified formula made without phosphates and chlorine bleach, but still leaves our dishes sparkling! I highly recommend taking a look at ALL your household cleaning supplies and making switches because it’s seriously crazy what’s in some of those products!

Beyond dishes, the second most important thing in the kitchen, in my opinion, is making sure everything is wiped down. The best method for success here that I’ve learned since I started cooking more, is to do that stuff as you go. If you cook a meal, that means you’re also committing to cleaning up afterward – it’s that simple. But for those nights when clean up just seems impossible, because let’s be real, at the very least rinse all your dishes off because chipping off dried food the next day sucks.

how to organize your bathroom // bathroom organization reveal

Keeping The Bathrooms Clean

Let’s just say it right out of the gate – no one likes cleaning bathrooms. Like the kitchen, though, it’s an important place to not let buildup happen. And it’s also more about having good cleaning products (and actually using them) than it is about pretty organization (although that helps).

Cleaning the toilets and showers once a week is going to be a lot easier and less time consuming than letting it go for weeks at a time. What I’ve been trying to do is commit to once a week giving the bathroom a quick scrub. I literally put it in my calendar so I don’t forget to do it – and it always goes by quicker than I think! I usually put on an audiobook or podcast to make the time go by quicker!

I also try to plan it for a weeknight because I don’t want my weekends turning into my dedicated ‘clean the bathroom time’. If you have roommates or a family, this gets a little easier because you can rotate weeks for who is responsible for cleaning, which is nice.

Keeping The Living Spaces Clean

The living room is the easiest to maintain on a day-to-day basis in my opinion. I say that because if I’m taking care of my bedroom and all my personal clutter, then the living room usually isn’t that bad. All that’s really required is a quick organizing of the decorative pillows, making sure the coffee table decor isn’t messed up and, if I’m really feeling motivated, I might give it a quick vacuuming. It’s kind of like a domino effect – if I let other rooms in the house go, that’s when the living room turns into a disaster. This gives me a little more motivation to keep a better eye out for the other spaces because it’s kind of like a two birds, one stone situation.

The moral of the story is, cleaning as you go versus doing a giant cleaning overhaul is SOOOO much easier. And the tips I gave you hopefully make you feel like the little things you can do each day or once a week will make a BIG difference in keeping your house clean.

And if you’re interested in making a product swap, you can snag the Cascade pure essentials dish detergent I’ve been using for $1 off now through May 25th with the online eSaver on Kroger.com using this coupon!

*This post is sponsored by Cascade but all opinions are my own.