(3) Practical Household Tips and Tricks for a Clean and Tidy Home

Household tips to make your life easier!

Staying clean and organized can be a job and a half! Keeping up with everyday cleaning tasks is tough, and once you start drifting behind, you can really fall back in your household schedule. When you do, that clutter and dust just piles up, and after a while, it can start to seem like a hopeless case. These quick household tips will help you to minimize your time and effort and maximize your results in every room of your house!

At the begining of each year I have the sudden urge to PURGE (pun totally intended) and organize my house. I’m always looking for cool tips and things that make my life easier. Send any great tips you have my way! :) Today I’ve rounded up 20 household tips to make your life easier. YEA! Are you wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Yeah… I was too. ;)

Living Room or Media Room

This is a difficult spot in your house to keep clean because it’s so central. Clutter accumulates regularly from a lot of different sources. These tips will help you get things back under control. For the best results, get everyone in your household onboard with your new cleaning and organizing tactics!

Clear the clutter first. Especially if you have kids, all kinds of random items are going to pile up in the living room. Grab a laundry basket or a large plastic bin and start by collecting all the loose random items. Get that out of the way and redistribute it all later.

If you don’t already have one, get a basket for your remote controls so they stop getting lost behind the couch or under cushions.

Get a magazine rack or newspaper stand, but make sure you don’t keep anything in there for too long. The moment you let that get out of hand, you will just end up with heaps of magazines you will “go through later” but never do. After you have gone through them, clip out anything you want to save and recycle the rest.

Come up with a clever organizing system for your multimedia. One great way to condense your collection of DVDs and CDs is by purchasing those booklets you can store the discs in. Put the original boxes in storage. You will free up so much space.

Did you know you can remove marks on wood furniture using a walnut? Cut it in half and rub it into the scratch. Don’t have a walnut? Pecans, Brazil nuts and almonds all work fine. After you rub the nut across the furniture, rub the area with your fingers. This will help the oils from the nut soak into the surface of the wood. Buff it up with a cloth, and you’re set.

Have houseplants with dusty leaves? Grab a banana and eat it and keep the skin. Use the skin to clean the leaves. The dust will stick right to it, and the juice is healthy for the plants.

Static electricity on your TV screen? Grab a dryer sheet and run it across your screen to get rid of it.

Want to shine up your wood with a quick and easy home mixture? Never mind furniture polish. Just grab some olive oil and lemon juice and mix them in a 2:1 ratio. Go over your wood surfaces with it and your furniture will shine.

If you look inside your vases and find they are full of dirt, you can clean them out by filling them with vinegar. Add a handful of dry rise, and swish the vases around. Pour everything out, and they should be significantly cleaner inside. A very cool little trick.

Don’t use commercial wood cleaners. Believe it or not, these supposedly specialized products often contain silicone. Silicone can leave a residue in your wood grain, which can actually be bad for the wood’s appearance over time. A damp cloth works better; just use water. It is all you really need!

Kitchen

Keeping the kitchen clean and tidy is even harder than keeping the living room or media center in order! But if you do, it pays off in terms of time saved. It’s faster and easier to prepare meals, and you can spend more time relaxing and savoring the results.

Keep your cling film in the fridge. A lot of people find it much more cooperative and easier to use when it is cold.

Grease buildup on top of your cabinets? You need to keep the tops of your cabinets clean, but thankfully you don’t have to look at them. That makes this an easy problem to solve. If you line the tops of your cabinets with newspaper, you can protect them from grease.

Fingerprints all over your stainless steel appliances? Put a little baby oil on a clean, soft cloth, and run it over the surfaces. Those prints should lift right off.

Use magnets to give yourself some extra storage space. How? Metallic spice jars and utensils can both stick to magnets. You can then use the magnets to stick them to the side of your fridge. It looks odd, but there is no denying it is super handy. Very clever approach to keeping everything organized and in reach!

Put plastic containers with lids inside your drawers, or use plastic drawer dividers. These will create handy pockets of space for different items.

Bathrooms

Keep your old toothbrushes. They are great for a million purposes in and out of the bathroom. Use them to clean grout in the bathroom or kitchen. They are also handy for cleaning jewelry, and much, much more.

Use kitchen drawer dividers in your bathroom. You know, those same things you use for silverware and other odds and ends. Those dame dividers can be perfect for storing makeup, toothbrushes, floss containers, and other small items in your bathroom drawers. As in the kitchen, they serve the additional function of protecting your drawers from moisture.

Keep all your larger toiletries (hair spray, lotion, etc.) inside a larger bin or box, and store that under your sink. When you get ready each day, you can just pull it out and use everything, and then put it all back. That’s a lot easier than looking for every item individually.

Install hooks for towels. If you don’t have enough room for all your towels on your towel racks, mounting hooks is fast and easy and will provide you with the additional space you need.

You can also attach towel racks or hooks to the back of your bathroom door

Replace your shower caddy with overhead storage. A shower caddy can be useful, but it can also really easily get in your way. Why not hang storage from overhead in your shower instead? In fact, you can always just mount your caddy from a hook.

Bedrooms

The bedroom poses a lot of organization and cleaning challenges. Dresser drawers, shelves, the closet: all of these areas can be tricky to clean and keep tidy. Here are some ideas which will make bedroom cleaning and organizing much easier.

Get a color scheme. If you don’t already have a color scheme in your bedroom, it probably looks even more cluttered than it actually is. Just choosing a few key colors and coordinating them with your décor can really bring focus to a bedroom. This is an especially helpful tip if you are living in a cramped space.

Have clothing that doesn’t fit? There is no reason to keep it in your closet. Even if you are keeping it around to motivate you to lose weight, it’s best if you pack it away and move it to a storage area. All it is doing is cluttering your closet (and probably depressing you).

Seasonal clothing, blankets, and accessories can also be moved to a storage area off-season. That means items like scarves, gloves, and heavy clothes during the summer, and items like light summery clothing during the wintertime.

Do some decluttering! If you wouldn’t buy it today if you saw it hanging on a department store rack, why do you have it around now? There is probably someone who wants it more and would wear it more than you. Take it to the thrift shop and free up that space.

If your closet has just a single bar for hanging clothes, you are probably having a hard time keeping neat and organized. Consider buying a closet organizer which you can use to add additional bars and shelves. This is a great way to maximize your space, and many closet organizers are surprisingly cheap.

Outdoors

Once you’ve got the indoor areas of your home organized, you can’t forget about the outdoor areas! Your garage, shed, garden, poolside and lawn all need to stay clean and neat too. Image: Flickr.

Have oil spots on your driveway or sidewalk? One easy way to get rid of them is by pouring on some baking soda, then scrub the stains with an old brush. The baking soda will soak up the oil and the elbow grease will loosen it up.

If you have a freezer in your garage or shed, it can easily accumulate rust and mold because of the damp conditions. You can prevent this by adding a coat of wax to the outside.

Tired of the soil in your potted plants draining out of the holes on the bottom? In the future, when you pot your plants, put a coffee filter down in the bottom. This will cover the holes and keep soil from leaking out, but will still allow water to drip through.

White vinegar can kill weeds that are pushing up between the cracks in your patio or sidewalk.

There are a couple of handy ways you can contain sports balls in your garage or mudroom. A large drawstring bag is a great way to keep them all in place. Another option in your garage is to install bungee cords over a shelf or a niche in your wall. The cords will hold them all in place, but it makes it easy to reach in and get one from anywhere in the stack.

Color-code your garage. It can be so easy for all the tools and equipment in your garage to blend together, especially since garage lighting is often not the best. One great hack is to section off different parts of your walls for different categories (yard tools, recycling stuff, etc.). You can then paint each wall section a different color to denote what it’s for. This makes it effortless to find all your tools and equipment at a glance.

General Tips and Tricks

Finally, here are some more general and miscellaneous tips and tricks for running your household smoothly!

Before you bring any new item into your household, put some thought into where you will put it, and try to actually choose the most logical room for it. Don’t feel like you have the space? Don’t buy it until you make the space.

Thinking of doing a complete makeover of a room in your house? Always take a picture first. It will be amazing to see how you have progressed. Once you are organized, take another photo. Don’t just keep it as documentation. Tack it to your wall or put it somewhere else handy. When the room starts looking different from what you have in the picture, it may be time to clean up again. Spot the differences and you will immediately see what is out of place

Have scratches on glass surfaces? Try rubbing some toothpaste over the surface, and then polish with a microfiber cloth. This can really improve the appearance of the glass.

A wad of newspaper which you have dipped in a mixture of vinegar and water (in a 1:10 ratio) can be a surprisingly effective way to clean mirrors and windows.

Have an LCD monitor you need to clean? Try using a dry microfiber cloth, buffing gently in wide, circular motions. The larger your strokes, the better. If that still isn’t enough, you can dampen it slightly with water. Never use anything other than microfiber!

Copper and brass can both be cleaned effectively using a salt and lemon juice mixture (amazing how many things that is good for!). Use the salt in a 3:1 ratio with the juice.

You can also clean brass using ketchup or Worcestershire sauce.

Flies hate lavender, so it’s a great flower to put next to your windows. As a bonus, it smells amazing.

Coffee grounds are another great way to dispel bad odors and replace them with good odors. A bowl of grounds smells great wherever you put it, and is especially helpful in the fridge.

If you break a dish and the fragments scatter everywhere, you can pick them up quickly, safely, and easily using a ball of Play-Doh. The shards will embed inside, and then you can throw them away.

Looking for a way you can quickly and thoroughly dust off lampshades or plant leaves? A lint brush is your answer. A quick roll over and you will get that dust off almost effortlessly.

If sweeping gives you grief, equip yourself with the right tools for the job. Finer bristles are good for picking up smaller particles, and are perfect for indoors. Outdoor jobs usually call for brooms with larger, stiffer bristles.

Brooms should be stored with the handle down, not up. This will protect the bristles from damage and will also make it easier for you to tell one broom from another.

Run the clock and figure out how long your various household chores actually take. You will likely find they take less time than you think. This will make it easier to commit to doing them in the future.

When you bring a new paper into the house (bills, etc.), immediately either deal with it, file it, or toss it. That will prevent paperwork from piling up.

We hope you enjoyed all these household tips and tricks! We love learning new things, so please be sure to share your favorite cleaning and organizing secrets with us in the comments below!