Cleaning is one of those things we know is necessary to our health and home, but we typically only like the result of cleaning, not the activity of cleaning itself.
But like any other life task, we can look to Reddit for suggestions on how to make cleaning easier.
Taking notes, Redditor totsatot0 asked:
"What's the best hack when deep cleaning your house?"
Different Surfaces, Different Needs
"Use a wet swiffer to clean the shower, especially if the ceiling needs a cleaning. Same for a dry swiffer on non-tile surfaces."
- Olive0121
A Clean Slate
"Maybe not a hack, but something that's always worked for me: just haul everything out of the room you're cleaning (don't worry about the ensuing chaos)."
"Strip it down; clean the surfaces; then as you start putting everything back, you'll find yourself naturally cleaning all the nitty gritty things as you go, as well as tossing out the dead weight and reorganizing in a sensible manner."
- mangomarongo
"Do not do this if you have ADHD. All that stuff you hauled out will live wherever you left it for a month while you work on everything else."
- eitherxorchid
A Place For Everything And Everything In Its Place
"Take a laundry basket into the room with you. While you're cleaning, anything in the room that belongs in another room goes into the laundry basket."
"When you go to the next room, the first thing you do is look in the laundry basket for anything that belongs in that room. Clean that room and put the misfits into the laundry basket."
"Move to the next room and repeat. At the end, empty the laundry basket of anything that's left."
"This helps me stay in the room I'm cleaning, which makes my cleaning more purposeful and less like a crazed bumblebee."
"If the bumblebee thing works for you, great!! But it does not work for me."
- that-1-chick-u-know
One Room At A Time
"One room at a time. It's difficult, especially if ADHD is a factor, but you really need to focus on one room at a time."
"I actually take a week of vacation every year and deep clean my house. I do one room a day*, top to bottom."
"Curtains and cushion covers get washed, wood gets oiled, furniture gets moved, the whole shebang. It's a lot of work, but I feel MUCH better afterward, and the house usually stays looking good for a few months before the dogs and clutter get to it."
"It's next week! I'm already planning and trying to declutter before the cleaning starts."
"*I count the bathroom and the mud room as half a room each, since they're so small. One is mostly scrubbing, the other is mostly organizing. I can do both in a day."
- reijasunshine
A Necessary Mixture
"Mix (baking) soda with bleach to create a thick paste. Apply the paste on these hard-to-clean moldy silicon spots in the bathroom."
"Both soda and bleach have a whitening effect, but soda has trouble penetrating and bleach has trouble sticking to the surface, being a liquid. Making a paste with a high concentration of bleach solves it. Works better than using paper towels soaked with bleach."
- Unicorn_Columbo
It Won't Be Missed
"If you haven't used it in a year, you probably won't ever use it. Get rid of it."
- captainstyles
"Just tossed my fire extinguisher!"
- porcelainsnake
"Same! And the smoke detectors."
- akopley
Never Argue With The Microwave Again
"Here's a tip for the microwave. Wet a hand towel and microwave it for a few minutes. Remove it with tongs! Everything comes right off afterward."
- Tabboo
"Mix a bowl of water and squeezed lemon. Microwave for three minutes. Wipe. Done and smells nice."
- Whopewell
"It doesn't smell as nice, but white vinegar works just as well if you don't have lemon juice on hand!"
- happy-polychaetes
Zone Your Home
"Organize based on how you use things, rather than their type or category, and make it as easy as possible to put things back where they go, even if it isn’t the most efficient or elegant solution."
"Also, all bulk containers in the kitchen should be 25 percent larger than the size of the package you buy (if you buy five pounds of sugar at a time, the container should hold six or more pounds)"
- Longjumping_Band_182
Ask For Help
"It's worth the $500 to have someone else do it."
- SweetCosmicPope
"Yup! It's not even the money, it's the time. I don't get a lot of free time, like what the f**k am I spending it doing something I do not enjoy."
- __Hoof__Hearted__
"It's totally the time. A professional cleaner can clean my house better in three hours than I could if I tried all week."
"They're not picking up a sweater and walking it to the other room and then realizing that it can't go in the closet because it's not winter so all the winter clothes need to go into storage so I have to go to the basement and get the ladder so I can go to the attic so I can get the winter storage box so I can reorganize my entire closet (runs out of air)."
"Meanwhile, I haven't dusted or vacuumed a thing."
"Getting the actual cleaning done is impossible for people like me."
- _SCHULTZY_
Unnecessary Stuff
"Don't hold on to junk that you never use, because you don't want to create waste by throwing it out."
"It's already waste, it just lives in your house instead of a landfill."
"Donate it if you can, sure, but sometimes it's easier to just throw it away and give yourself grace for it."
- happy_polychaetes
Get In The Rhythm
"I put on energizing music."
- yParticle
"This is a little strange, but I like to put on runway show music in the background when I clean. Usually, it's super long and kinda questionable energetic music, so you can do 25 minutes of cleaning and feel like a supermodel all in one. (Balenciaga has some good soundtracks in my opinion, love or hate the brand.)"
- NickyThePerson
Get A Team Together
"Asking someone to help you. You can do both the hard cleaning in a short time period and be efficient."
- Comfortable_Raise067
"Cannot stress this enough. Recruit a kid, a spouse, a friend. Even if it takes the same amount of time, you have someone to talk to."
- whopewell
"I don’t have children, but if I did, I’d definitely have a 'dirtiest wipe contest' and give each kid a bleach wipe and see who can make it darker, and the winner gets a prize. I’ve heard of teachers doing this, lol (laughing out loud)."
- Patient-War-4964
"If you’ve got a specific room you want to attack, just having someone to sit with you while you do it, and it makes a world of difference. It’s called body doubling!"
- kucky94
Just Get Started
"Do it right now. I got the cleaning bug halfway through my workday."
"The first order of business (this is the hack): strip the bed down and start washing sheets/blankets. I've been feeling a little melancholy the last couple of days after work and just laying in bed with the dogs. But I can't do that if all the bedding is in the wash. Might as well clean for the next couple of hours if the bed isn't available."
"After that, I threw on some headphones and cracked open a few cold ones while cleaning. Put a decent dent in what needed to be done. Will pick up where I left off this weekend (after work plans the next couple nights)."
- Baz_Ravish69
Well, There's That
"Open a beer, sit down, and wait until the urge to clean goes away."
- Skittles_The_Unicorn
While cleaning isn't inherently hard when we break it down into individual steps, like wiping off a counter, it can feel like an insurmountable and neverending task when we're stressed, overworked, or maybe have a diagnosis like ADHD.
But this conversation's two most common threads were having a support system and decluttering.
Asking for help or even just for company is not a bad thing, even for something as necessary as cleaning, and by having fewer things in our homes, dust has less of a chance of accumulating, and we have less tidying or reorganizing to do before we ever even get to the cleaning part.
