On my last article about the 8 Tips to Keep A Clean & Orderly Home, Dragonette Zimkhia asked me to lend some advice for people, who disliked housework.  First and foremost with cleaning up and organization, the number one thing that you will earn is time. For every minute that you waste looking for the light bill, keys, or your baby’s pacifier, you could be doing something interesting and fun. What a thing it would be to get that time back huh, to barely ever have a situation where you are needed but get delayed due to misplacing an item? Organization and order prevents this, so let me see if I can offer you some advice on organization. While it’s been done before, my aim is to help those of you who hate cleaning, hate organizing and the thought of it makes you tired.

Tip #1 – Keep Pick Nick Baskets

Nope not a misspelling, just an attempt at humor (don’t worry I’ll see myself to the door). A pick nick basket is a good looking vessel whose purpose is to store things temporarily until it becomes time to empty it. Think of it as a trash can for items that aren’t trash but have a potential to become mess. Store them near doorways, one by the front, another by the closet, etc. etc. You need them on hand in every room and everyone in your household needs to know their purpose and importance.

The way these containers function is for throwing items that you find yourself unwilling to put away properly. Take for instance, you come home tired, you plop down into your couch, turn on the television and kick off your shoes. Time passes and you need to get to bed, but there is the living room with disheveled clothes, shoes and a plate of half eaten food all over. The entire scene is daunting to look at much less attempt to rectify through cleaning. So you toss the plate on the bar, grab everything off of the floor and chuck it towards the nearest “basket”. The next day when you’re freshly risen, feeling good and alert, you can push the clothes fully into the basket, place the dishes into the sink and go on with your day.

On weekends or the days when you feel lively enough to empty the baskets, walk the items within to the areas where they belong and place the empty basket back where you found it. The Pick Nick Baskets are a lifesaver for emergency pop-ins also. If you want your place neat enough when you have company coming over, rather than panicking and do a piss poor job of cleaning up in the few minutes you have, just shove the baskets into a closet and gather up the extras. Now if you had stuck to the script of throwing items toward the baskets versus throwing them all over the place, you will find that things are now easier for you this way.

Tip #2 – Think Like a Thief

This is the best advice my mother ever told me in regards to being neat. You should think of your home as a place of respect, as if it isn’t yours and you are there to borrow things from it. The catch is, you must try to leave things as if you hadn’t touched them to begin with. So when you grab the remote and begin channel surfing, practice placing it back exactly where you took it from. Expand this to magazines, clothes, etc. and drill it into your children. Everything must have a place, and it must be a law that you yourself must follow before your children, your guests and any visitor within your home is made to follow suit. The house is a spirit on to itself, respect it and where things belong and you will get better with keeping things together.

Tip #3 – Make Cleaning The Bathroom A Ritual

Bathrooms are best tackled as rituals, what I mean by this is that a routine must be employed weekly that will be quick and easy for you each time. If you have children, I would urge you to make a chore out of the toilet bowl being cleaned in the guest portion of the house. Have little Elizabeth get the ammonia (just kidding), bleach and Mr. Clean and scrub the interior of that nasty pit along with the visible porcelain that comes into human contact. Using a rag she should wipe it down dry and as I said this should be done weekly, which ensures cleanliness and an easy chore for you or a child.

For the tub you should keep a scrub brush near it for the weekends when you take your bath/shower. Scrub it down prior to entering the shower and use the running water to rinse the grime away prior to taking your long bath. Once this becomes routine the pain-staking process of removing a hard black rim from it when company comes over will be non-existent.

Truly, the secret to a clean, orderly home is in adopting clever rituals to remind yourself when to clean up. Remember, the better the maintenance, the easier the upkeep.

Written by Greg Dragon on Tuesday, May 25, 2010 

Filed under A Touch of Class, Pretty Metrosexual
Tagged with bathroom, cleanliness, household, tips