Cleaning Your New House Before Moving Day




 Before moving day




On or after moving day




Room by room cleaning




Relaxing Ways to Clean Your House

You may be the rare type of person that looks forward to cleaning your home, but most people do not relate. Cleaning your house is a pretty easy task to procrastinate because it usually takes so much time and energy from your already busy lifestyle. Of course, everyone within your household enjoys a tidy living space, but no one is up for the job. Believe it or not, some things you can do right now to keep your home tidy and relaxing every day of the week!

  1. Everything has a place. Assign each item a place and ensure that everyone in your household knows where those items go. For example: Where do shoes go when your family gets home from work or school? Is there a place by the door or do they go in the bedroom? Create a designated area for those items, and your home will maintain organization throughout the week.
  2. Create a chore list that assigns small chores each day rather than cleaning every surface in one day. For instance: Mondays can be the day everyone dusts their bedrooms, Tuesdays give someone the task of vacuuming the living area and so on. By doing a little now and then, you maintain your homes ability to remain a relaxing environment.
  3. Make cleaning a family activity. It can be hard to get the kids motivated to clean their rooms, but when everyone in the household is doing their part, kids can quickly jump on board. Something you could start is “The five-minute pick-up game.” Set a timer for five minutes each day and ask that everyone tidy up their space for five minutes. Setting a limit will not only keep you from a few meltdowns but will also save you so much time that you could be spending on the couch resting!
  4. Once a month go through your home and declutter a room. It’s so easy to collect unwanted items that pile up in a closet to collect dust, but you can save yourself the stress later by organizing one room each month. Declutter by asking yourself when the last time you used the item, and if you plan to use it anytime soon. If you no longer have a specific use for the article, then donate it to someone in need. 

As you take a few minutes during each day to clean your home, you will save yourself so much time throughout the week that you can spend enjoying time with your friends and family.

Household Cleaning Tips for Home Sellers

One of the many challenges of putting your home on the market is keeping it clean!

That task can be even more difficult if you have kids, pets, and a busy schedule. If everyone is always rushing off to their jobs, classes, lunch dates, meetings, practices, or appointments, it’s hard to keep your home in a perpetual state of cleanliness and order.

Probably the first step to keeping your house ready for real estate showings is to remind your family to clean up after themselves. While this may require more than one reminder, any amount of cooperation will help keep messes to a minimum. Implementing some sort of reward system or even a competition among siblings, can go a long way toward maintaining a semblance of order in the house. Some parents even post a calendar of assigned chores to make sure everyone does their fair share.

Professional Help May Be Needed!

Getting your home ready for real estate showings can feel like a monumental task, especially if you have a large house and a messy family! The good news is that you can hire some outside help without depleting your kids’ college funds! Many households already have a house cleaning person or service that comes in at least a couple times a month to keep things looking civilized. If your house is actively being shown to prospective buyers, however, you might want to consider having your housekeeper clean the house a little more frequently than usual. That way, you only have to do some minor tidying up when your real estate agent notifies you about a scheduled house showing in a few hours or tomorrow morning.

If any of your rooms are carpeted and the floors haven’t been professionally steam-cleaned for as long as you can remember, it may be time to hire a carpet cleaning service. Carpeted floors have an unfortunate tendancy of locking in stains, allergens, and ground-in dirt for months, if not years! Although you can often improve the appearance of your carpets by cleaning them yourself, it often requires the services of a professional carpet cleaning service to really get those stubborn stains out. You can often get recommendations from neighbors, friends, relatives, or coworkers, and can look for online reviews of carpet cleaners on social media websites.

Once you’ve cleaned, dusted, and sanitized the inside of your house, there may be one more area to tackle before you’re ready to have your house shown: its exterior! Your home’s siding may be covered with filmy layers of dust, grime, splatters, and environmental pollutants — a condition which thankfully can be reversed by using the services of a local power-washing company. While not all power-washing services are created equal, a reliable one can remove years of accumulated filmy deposits from pollen, birds, spider webs, acid rain, snow blower splatters, rust, smoky emissions from backyard barbeques, vehicle exhaust emissions, and other miscellaneous air pollution.

So even though the environment, your family, and the wear and tear of normal, everyday use will take its toll on the appearance of your home, there are many things you can do to reverse that process and restore many aspects of your home’s original freshness, charm, and appeal!

4 Tips To Keep Your Home Clean With Children

Children. You love them with all your being. But the mess they can make of the house? Not so much. Keep reading for four tips on how to keep your home clean despite your children’s best efforts. You might even be able to get them to join in on the fun! 

1. Cleanup after playtime. Build the habit of cleaning up one set of toys before moving on to the next, this not only keeps the floor from becoming littered in toys but also makes cleaning up more manageable for little ones. A large mess can easily overwhelm small children and by cleaning up along the way you make the task easier for them to participate in.

2. Have an organizational system for corralling toys that works for you and more importantly your children. Make cleanup easy by storing toys in bins and baskets that toys can easily be tossed into. Cleanup is made even easier when you give everything a designated place so there isn’t a chance for toys to end up in organizational limbo. Do a walk through of the house sweep once little ones are in bed to ensure everything has been put in its place.

3. The easiest way to keep things clean is to minimize the amount of stuff you and your children own. Of course, this is harder to implement with little ones but regular clean outs of toys helps to balance the influx of toys that come during holidays and birthdays. Include kiddos in on the process to pick out their favorites and get them excited to donate toys to other children. You can put some toys in storage and swap them out regularly throughout the year to minimize the amount kept in the home and reignite your child’s interest in them as well.

4. Create regular routines around the house to instill clean up habits in your child early on. Create designated areas around the house for play time, quiet time or even homework. This helps children adjust to focus on the task at hand as well as prevent toys from ending up all over the house. By keeping a routine time of day to do a  household chore you’ll also teach little ones the importance of having work ethic around the home. You can even involve curious kiddos in the chore by buying them a child-sized broom or vacuum to “help”. 

Keeping a tidy home with little ones in the house isn’t the easiest of tasks. But by minimizing the amount of stuff you own and instilling a regular clean up habits you can keep on top of messes. You can even create some fond memories and bonding time with your child by including them in on the fun. Happy cleaning!