How to keep a clean & tidy home

Keeping a clean and tidy home has many many benefits. One big one being that it enables you to feel much more inspired and motivated. It can be quite difficult to work and be productive in a messy environment. Additionally, having a decluttered home increases my happiness and decreases my stress levels.. I'm sure many people feel this way!

It's all well and good wanting a constant clean and tidy home but if you're anything like me, you also won't want to have to continuously be maintaining your home.. this is where the following tips can help.

1. Do the following small things every day - at the end of the day would be the most ideal if you don't want to do them several times throughout the day:

• Hoover

• Wipe down surfaces (kitchen primarily)

• Put things back after having used them

It's much easier to stay on top of these jobs and they aren't very daunting meaning they won't require much time or energy to complete them daily. I have been doing this consistently for a few weeks now and I've noticed a HUGE difference in my mental state as well as the state of my home. I then will do a proper deep clean once a week and it's never as difficult as all of the smaller jobs are already taken care of and therefore are not building up. I'd say deep cleaning my entire 1 bedroom apartment on my own now takes me 1 hour. And I know that this is because I spend 10 mins each day doing those smaller jobs. I've found it really useful to build a routine with cleaning and tidying. For example, each evening before I sleep, I like to almost 'reset' every room in the house to how it was when I woke up in the morning. This has become part of my evening routine and ensures I start the following day feeling productive.

2. Don't forget those pesky hidden areas of your house. These are places like inside cupboards where crumbs can very quickly collect or behind doors that when you're cleaning are usually open so you miss what's going on behind the door. Again, this is not something I do every day, but when I can, maybe every 2 weeks I make sure to check out these hidden areas and give them a clean. I started doing this more regularly when I realised in my old house, soy sauce rings would start forming in my kitchen cupboards which was not ok and I didn't like at all!

3. Assess your surroundings and actively look for anything that is currently lying around that should have a home, but doesn't and then find a home for these things. It's so super easy to leave things on surfaces for convenience but doing this can really make the place become cluttered and can very quickly add up and will end up looking untidy and messy. Not to mention, all this clutter adding up would make it 10x harder to wipe down surfaces each day/night like I mentioned earlier.

4. The next tip is all about washing up! Those annoying dirty dishes! I don't have a dishwasher so if I'm not on top of this, it doesn't look very nice when dirty dishes are piling up around the sink area. I find that if I have lots of dirty dishes building up, no matter how clean and tidy the rest of the kitchen is, it always looks messy. I either do the dishes first thing in the morning before breakfast or after my evening meal. What you could do is declutter your cups and plates so you are forced to clean them quicker as you will run out of dishes etc to use. Another thing I sometimes try to do is actually wash up whilst cooking. If I am waiting for something to heat up or cook in oven for example, I will use that time to wash up as much as possible to either clear it all or just lighten the load for later. It looks so much nicer to have a clean and tidy kitchen and I find it way more inspiring to cook healthy meals when its feeling nice.

5. Put away any clothes in your bedroom BEFORE you get into bed. It's very tempting to climb into bed when you're tired and forget about the state your room is in. If you do this you will quite likely wake up and feel annoyed at past you for not just doing it! My partner, Annabel actually used to be a culprit of this but I think I have managed to train her to put everything away before bed and she will tell you how glad she is she now does this! I truly believe it helps me sleep better and wake up calmer.

6. This last tip is one you've heard me say on this channel so many times and that is to keep checking your wardrobe, fridge, kitchen cupboards etc regularly to declutter anything you haven't used in a long time or anything that isn't serving you any purpose. With kitchen cupboards, you could sort through to check if anything is out of date etc. When it comes to keeping a minimal home its not just about what you see on the surface, it's about what' inside the cupboards too! Easy to forget!!

And that rounds up my 6 tips for keeping a clean and minimal home. I hope you enjoyed the video and got some inspiration from the tips I have shared.

Check out my YouTube channel : Hayleys Hacks

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

Hayley