Cleaning is not typically seen as a fun activity, but it’s necessary for a healthy and happy home. Nothing beats the feeling of coming home to a clean and neat space that feels inviting and smells awesome.
Keeping your house clean is about more than sweeping the floors, occasional pressure washing, and wiping off dust from furniture. It’s a lifestyle, just like healthy eating.
When you have the right habits, you will be much better at keeping your home clean and tidy.
And that’s why you’re here—you’re looking for good habits to keep a clean home so you can always be proud of your home and feel relaxed.
Stick around, because we’ll be sharing the top 18 habits you should adopt to achieve this kind of lifestyle!
One: Make the Bed
Start your day off the right way by making your bed as soon as you’ve awakened. Making this a habit will help you get in the right mindset for a clean home even when you didn’t sleep well, feel a little under the weather, or have a very busy day ahead.
You don’t have to perfectly make your bed, but at least make it look neat and smooth. Many folks may feel that making the bed is a waste of time since it will be messed up again later, but even a hurried smoothing of your comforter will already make the room look cleaner.
Plus, it feels really nice to get into a made bed at night when you’re ready for your beauty sleep.
Two: Keep Basic Cleaning Supplies Close to Where You Use Them
Having all the basic cleaning supplies you need near at hand makes it easier to clean up messes and keep your home clean. This is one of the most important habits to keep a clean home, because if you can easily clean up spills with close-at-hand spray bottles and microfiber clothes, a neat home is not a distant dream.
For example, you should keep an attractive toilet scrub brush close to the toilet, as well as your favorite toilet cleaner. Having a reliable drain cleaner in all the rooms with basins is a good idea too, you’ll less frequently have to call drain cleaning companies.
Three: Deep Clean Your Rugs Regularly
For many people, their rugs are the pride and joy of their homes because each one was chosen with care. It’s not uncommon to find people who build an entire room around a rug’s appearance and colors.
With that said, even the most beautiful and lush rug can look unattractive and unappealing if it’s not cleaned regularly. You should deep clean your rugs as often as you can so they remain bright and lovely.
If you have too many rugs, or they’re too heavy for you to clean properly, call in the help of vacuum services or a rug cleaning company. They’ll have your rugs deep cleaned in no time!
Four: Clean as You Go
One of the most fundamental and useful habits to keep a clean home has to be ‘clean as you go’. Leaving items lying around or procrastinating cleaning your room after you’ve tried on four different outfits is a nice way to ensure your home stays untidy and feeling cluttered.
Clean up things you’ve just used immediately so you don’t have to worry about it later. If you’re truly in a hurry, make sure you clean up these random, small messes as soon as you find a moment to do so.
Cleaning as you go will ensure that you never get caught with dirty clothes lying on the bathroom floor or pots and pans spending too much time on the kitchen counter.
Five: Wipe Down Surfaces
You would be amazed at what a difference it can make when you habitually wipe down all your home’s surfaces. It doesn’t even have to be a thorough clean, a quick wipe-down will be good enough to keep your surfaces shiny and looking good.
After you’ve finished a task such as cutting up veggies, wipe the counter and you’ll feel more encouraged to keep the entire kitchen clean as you prepare your meals. When you’re done showering, give your shower door a quick wipe to clean it and you won’t have to struggle with soap scum later on.
Six: Do the Laundry Each Day
This may not be something that you’ve ever considered, but you should adopt a habit of doing your laundry every day. When you do, you can easily avoid an overflowing hamper that makes you feel like you’d rather do anything else. Saving the laundry for the weekend is a bad idea—you should be enjoying your weekends, not spending them doing chores.
Do your laundry every day, first thing in the morning, so it’s dry when you get home from work. You can also simply load the laundry and turn on the machine when you get home if that’s how you want to do it.
Seven: Prioritize
One of the most recommended habits to keep a clean home is ensuring you’ve got your priorities straight. Not all the cleaning chores are equally important, so you should make a list of what you need to do and a list of what you would like to do.
Prioritize the list based on how much free time you have and get the most important cleaning tasks done first. Do them before you do anything else so you can get the important tasks out of the way quicker.
For example, if you feel that cleaning the dishes is more important than dusting the living room furniture, then that’s how you have to prioritize your cleaning tasks.
Eight: Do Regular Home Repairs
Home repairs may not feel like part of keeping your home clean, but neglecting important repairs will lead to disasters that are a pain in the behind to clean up. For example, if you need to consider a new siding install job, get it done as soon as possible and clean the area as soon as possible.
Other cleaning tasks, such as drainage cleaning and making sure the gutters are free of debris, should be done often too. If you can’t find time, consider asking a local janitorial services company for assistance.
Also, if you hire a construction service for any repairs or renovations, remind them that they need to keep your clean home clean!
Nine: Categorize Paper
You may not think that mail, bills, take-out menus, pamphlets, notes from work and school and other paper items have to be organized, but if they’re not stored neatly, they can make your space feel messy and very cluttered. Paper tends to pile up really quickly.
For this reason, it is a good idea to have designated places for the papers in your home. You can have a drawer for all your coupons and take-out menus, and folders for your bills and notes, for example.
As soon as a new piece of paper enters your home, make sure it is put away in the appropriate storage place.
Ten: Declutter Regularly
Decluttering regularly is one of the cardinal habits to keep a clean home, or at least, it should be. It won’t matter how much you clean your home if you have lots of items taking up space and making the entire place look messy.
Plus, who feels like really cleaning when there’s clutter everywhere? It is important that you get rid of as much clutter as possible as soon as you notice it taking over your home.
When you buy something new, get rid of something old (and get a warm and fuzzy feeling from donating!).
Eleven: Clean Your Fridge Weekly
Your fridge could be possibly be one of the most overlooked spaces in need of a good cleaning in your home. We use our fridges all the time, but only notice that they’re dirty when we smell something funky or notice gross goop.
Don’t let your fridge get to that point. After all, it’s where you keep your food! Keep it neat and shiny by giving it a weekly cleaning. This can also help you shop for items as soon as they’re finished instead of not noticing until it’s too late.
Twelve: Clean Up After Cooking
What is worse than having to wash the dishes when you’re stuffed full of macaroni and cheese (and that yummy dessert you decided to make)? Leaving the dishes to pile up until the next day!
Don’t give in to temptation and start relaxing the moment you finish dinner. Instead, quickly tidy up the kitchen and put away all the dishes so your kitchen is nice and refreshingly clean. It’s also a good idea to clean as you cook so you don’t have as much to clean afterward.
Thirteen: Give Everything Its Own Place
Number thirteen on our list of habits to keep a clean home is not unlucky at all. In fact, it will help you keep your space tidy and neat in the long run. It’s difficult to put stuff away if you don’t really know where you should be putting it.
So give every item in your home its own place and make sure that it is put there after use, immediately if possible.
Fourteen: Straighten Before Bedtime
This may be one of the hardest habits to keep a clean home to adopt, because it is really easy to unwind and get lazy when the sun goes down. However, doing a quick sweep through the most used rooms in your home before you go to bed is a very good habit.
Quickly put away all those toys, shoes, clothes, blankets, and other miscellaneous items that weren’t put in their places during the day. Then you can head to bed knowing you’ll wake up to a fresh, clean home.
Fifteen: Never Leave a Room Empty-Handed
If you want a cleaning habit that will make a very big difference in the general cleanliness of your home, this is it. As you move from one room to the next in your home, make a point of doing a scan of the space and finding something that you can take with you to either put away or throw away.
By doing this, you’ll be passively cleaning your home so the work left for the end of the day is much less. Make these one of your most focused habits to keep a clean home, because it’s easy to forget when you get distracted by life and other things happening.
Sixteen: Create a Cleaning Checklist
Sometimes, cleaning your home as thoroughly as you should can feel rather overwhelming. Where do you start? Well, create a cleaning checklist and that won’t be a problem at all. Remember that you don’t have to do everything at once.
Try to take on two or three big tasks a day while also finishing the smaller but daily tasks like the dishes and laundry. Your list should be in order of importance, as discussed in habit number seven.
Seventeen: Get the Whole Family Involved
A clean home is a team effort, especially if it’s a bigger home with several people living in it. That’s why you should get the whole family involved in adopting habits to keep a clean home. It will be much easier to keep the house clean if everyone is pitching in and doing their part.
Eighteen: Don’t Aim for Perfection
Although you should try your best to keep your home as clean as possible, you don’t have to aim for a perfectly spotless place. Perfection takes time, so perfectly cleaning your home will take time as well, which means this isn’t always a realistic aspiration.
Clean your home to the point that it’s neat and tidy, and don’t worry about cleaning it perfectly and making the house feel like a place where you’re punished for being a bit messy.
Enjoy Your Clean Home! Once you’ve read through this list of habits to keep a clean home, you’ll be ready for the hard part—actually keeping your home clean. It will be fun at first, then feel tedious, and then become a part of your daily routine. Once you’ve reached that point where keeping your home is habitual, you can relax and enjoy your clean house with pride! It may take some time, but once you’re there, you’ll feel awesome.