The holidays can be a stressful time for many people. Between dealing with family members and shopping for gifts who has time to live and enjoy life, or clean the house. Even when the holidays are over the stress continues as you try to pay off all the credit card bills from your Christmas gift shopping spree and all that food you had to buy.
And what happens when someone spills wine on your newly cleaned carpet? There’s even more stress building up as you re-clean, or replace, your nice carpet.There is one thing that you can do to eliminate some of that holiday stress- have a plan set in place for cleaning! It might help keep the dirty dishes from taking over.
Make A Schedule
Plan out your cleaning schedule so that you can make sure that you have time to get everything done. While things like dishes need to be done on a daily basis, there are other cleaning projects that can be split up between each of the days of the week.
Get a calendar that you can use simply for your cleaning schedule and hang it somewhere prominent. Give each day one major project and then make sure to clean dishes daily. If you do that at the same time each day it might be helpful as well.
Stay Up On It
If you avoid putting something off then you will also avoid having too much to do at once and getting behind. Once you have done the major clean of your home, stay up on it. That means putting things away after you’ve used them, keeping everything organized, and not putting off follow up.
Just because you just shampooed your carpet doesn’t mean it’s OK to put off vacuuming. You may even need to do some spot cleaning simply to keep from having to shampoo it again too soon. The same goes with rinsing dishes immediately and getting them in the dishwasher instead of letting that sit to have food harden on them.
Keep It Organized
One of the biggest issues in many home, when it comes to cleanliness, is the disorganized clutter that often takes over. You can beat clutter, you just need to have a place for everything you own and make sure that it finds its way back to that place immediately after use.
You may want to purchase some cabinets, storage boxes, and other organizing items. You may also want to dispose of some of your clutter. If you have items you haven;t used in six months donate them and you’ll have less mess to worry about.
Holidays don’t need to be extra stressful because of dirt and clutter. Just make sure you have a few trash bags on hand when people start opening their presents!