Between working a 9 to 5 job and seeing to our families we are often left with very little time to keep our homes looking good. According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, the average American household spends approximately 28 hours a week performing household chores, equating to nearly 4 hours a day – a lot of time by any standard. Sometimes we become ill or we simply don’t have the time to do everything that is expected of us in a single day and the housework piles up, leaving our homes unkempt and unhygienic. Luckily a few easy cleaning hacks are all you need to keep reduce your cleaning time by as much as 50% and keep your home in a supreme condition most of the time.
Pack your laundry as soon as it’s washed
Nothing piles up quite as fast as laundry does, both when it’s dirty and after it has been washed. If you keep postponing putting laundry away on the day it was washed, you may soon end up with piles of clean clothes all over the house. Make a point of taking half an hour each time you do a load to iron and pack away the clothes, making it easy to find the next time you are looking for a particular shirt or sweater. It literally takes a couple of seconds to roll a pair of socks and put them away whereas trying to find a matching pair among a huge pile of laundry can easily take up 20 minutes of your precious time.
Keep your oven clean
No one really has the time to spend hours scrubbing a grubby kitchen and even a self-cleaning oven can take 3 hours to complete a cycle. Unfortunately, oven cleaning is one of those household chores that simply have to be done as baked-on grease doesn’t just look bad but can harbor dangerous bacteria as well. Luckily there is a simple time and energy-saving solution to your oven dilemma. Non-stick baking sheets can be placed on the bottom of your oven rack to catch any spills and splatters that may occur. When the liner gets too dirty you simply remove it and replace it with another. If you keep your oven free of build-up it will only take you 5 minutes to wipe clean as opposed to waiting for 30 minutes or more while your oven cleaner loosens the grime before the scrubbing can commence.
Draw up a cleaning schedule
As mentioned earlier, not many people can afford to spend 4 hours on household chores a day. Drawing up a realistic cleaning schedule is one way to ensure that your home remains adequately clean at all times without having to spend all your free time scrubbing the floor and polishing cutlery. Break down your chores into manageable chunks, prioritizing them in such a way that you can utilize your time better. Some household tasks like doing dishes happen on a daily basis whereas defrosting your freezer or removing mold and mildew from your washing machine only need to occur once a month at most. If you find that you need, for instance, 20 minutes to mop the floors and you don’t have that much time, you can break it up into 2 x 10-minute segments that might suit your schedule better.
As parents, we don’t always get it right. Sometimes we might forget to put out the trash or feed the dog. As parents, we also do the best we can with the time and resources at our disposal. Every minute is precious to us and by making use of these and other tips and tricks, our household chores can become a lot more pleasant and less time-consuming, leaving us with more free time to spend with our loved ones.
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