Of all the chores that bachelors must endure, cleaning our apartments is possibly the worst. A lot of guys enjoy cooking. A few guys even enjoy doing the laundry. But I have never met a guy who enjoys cleaning. I’ve met a few women who find cleaning house to be a very therapeutic activity, but I think that they’re among the minority.
Most of us, men and women alike, hate to clean. What’s the solution? For most of us, it involves procrastinating until our apartments are so filthy and smelly that we have no choice. A few of us—those with a large disposable income—might hire a maid.
While both of these are options, the first isn’t particularly attractive, and the second isn’t affordable for most of us. The better solution: the one hour (or less) apartment clean-up.
photo credit: miss pupik
Cleaning Often Means Cleaning Less
If you wait until your kitchen counters have grown mold and your toilet has developed it’s own ecosystem, it’s going to take a long time to clean everything. The best way to clean your apartment is to do a little bit each day.
Cleaning only one room per day will make it easy to keep your apartment clean with an hour or less of work each day. Once you get a good system going, you’ll find that you can usually spend less than an hour per week cleaning.
Alternately, instead of cleaning one room per day, you can do just one chore per day. For example, you can do all of your vacuuming one day, clean the toilet the next, do the dusting on yet another day, and so on.
Quick Tips
In addition to doing only one room and/or one chore per day, there are other ways that you can cut back on the amount of time that you spend cleaning. Here are a few of the tricks I use to keep my place clean without spending too much time with a sponge in my hand:
- Use a daily shower cleaner: For the cost of about $4 a bottle, you can pick up a bottle of daily shower spray. This stuff makes cleaning your shower so much easier. Instead of scrubbing the tiles once a week, you just spray the shower stall down after you shower each morning and walk away—no scrubbing required. While it works best if you start with a clean shower, you can start with a dirty shower too, it’ll just take longer before you start to see results. Most bottles of daily shower cleaner will last for about 4 weeks. That means that, for the cost of about $1 per week, you can avoid ever having to scrub those tiles again.
- Use a “no scrubbing necessary” cleaner: Just as there are daily shower cleaners that require no scrubbing, there are a variety of cleaning solutions for other surfaces that don’t require scrubbing. While these are generally more expensive than those cleaners that do require scrubbing, you’d be surprised by the amount of time they can save. Not only that, if you’re not scrubbing, cleaning feels like less work, so you’ll be less likely to put it off.
- Dust before you vacuum: Yes, you have to dust your shelves, tables, and other flat surfaces. Yes, it is a pain in the rear. But, make sure to do it before you vacuum. If you do it after you vacuum, all of the dust you’ve just stirred up will settle on the carpet, and just get kicked back up onto the surfaces you just dusted once you start walking around. If you do it before you vacuum, then you’ll vacuum up all of the dust, and you won’t have to dust again for quite a while (unless, like me, you have dark-coloured furniture. Then, unfortunately, you’ll have to dust at least once a week, since dust is more apparent on dark surfaces).
- Buy a Roomba: If you can afford to buy your own robot vacuum cleaner, I highly recommend it. I can’t afford one myself, but I hope to get one eventually. Having a robot that vacuums for you means never having to do it yourself. Obviously, this will save you a significant amount of time in the long run. If you are feeling extra wealthy, get a Scooba and you’ll be free of mopping as well. If you’re wondering how I can recommend something I haven’t used myself, let me say that I know more than one person who owns a Roomba, and not one of them has regretted the purchase.
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