3 Steps to a Cleaner House
Sigh… I walked into my apartment around midnight Sunday after a long weekend out of town with a piece of luggage and garment bag in hand. Mountains of clothes and empty boxes stuffed with trash littered the apartment. Half of my blankets were on the couch and all the pillows had been strewn about as if someone had been wildly searching for evidence. A pile of dishes with caked-on food lay in the sink and a full load of clean-ish dishes in the rack. I sighed again and dropped the luggage and bag on the floor. Enough was enough. This place had to get clean, and it was going to happen this time! I slumped into bed and fell asleep right away. Well surely cleaning can wait one night…
I was at wit’s end just about a month ago. Travelling on the weekends and long work days had left me neglecting to clean on a daily basis. All cleaning activities were conducted in a sprint, usually involving clothes being thrown into closets and at minimum 3 bags of trash finally making their way to the dumpster. The dirtiness had become unacceptable and I needed to change. I skimmed over a quick Google search before landing on the aptly named Unfuck Your Habitat website.
I found a few key tenets from UFYH that I decided to try out for a month, in the hopes of building a good cleaning habit. The tenets are listed below, but keep in mind UFYH’s philosophy of 20/10 as you read them — basically working only 20 minutes at a time cleaning with a 10 or so minute break. This keeps you from burning out quickly, and also narrows your focus to the task at hand. It also keeps you from marathon cleaning, which builds complacency towards clutter in the first place.
1. Wash and put away your dishes.
This one became my home base. I started here first and found it to be the easiest thing to do. When the huge mess in the house seemed insurmountable, I did a load of dishes. I hand wash all my dishes, as I’ve always found it to be quicker and less annoying than putting them in the dishwasher and then taking them back out. One load of dishes takes me maybe 10 minutes to do. Since I was filling the whole rack with clean dishes, anytime I passed by the kitchen I made sure to check if they were dry. If they were, I put them away immediately. This area became the corner where the mess started to become manageable. Taking it out piece by piece from there was starting to seem doable.
2. Throw away your trash.
This one had always been my go-to cleaning method. As the week went on, napkins, boxes, and plastic packaging would accumulate further and further from the trash can. Trash is easy to clean, so there was no excuse for having it anywhere but in the garbage can. I started by taking out any trash on a flat surface in the room. Tabletops became visible again, counters were ready to be wiped down, and the whole place was starting to come together. Once I had cleaned all the trash off the floor, the third tenet became very easy.
3. Everything in your house has a home. Make sure it gets put away there.
This last principle comes from the well known adage “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Everything in your house needs to have a place where it can be stored. All my guitar stuff went into a box marked as such. Books made their way onto a shelf or into a container. Dishes went in the cabinets, and clothes went into the closet. The bed always got made before I went to sleep and the couch pillows were fluffed and back in their respective sides.
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One month later, my place had become clean and stayed that way. I built good habits centered around a few easy ideas and they had stuck. It wasn’t hard, and it was a whole lot less painful than the marathon cleaning I was used to. If you have trouble keeping your space clean, try it out!
