Best Ways to Clean Your House or Apartment

When trying to clean your house or apartment, it can seem overwhelming. In fact, even cleaning one room can sometimes seem overwhelming. The trick is to simplify the task. The best way to simplify it isn’t to go room by room, however, but category by category. For example, a great place to start is paper. Everyone has a ton of random paper that they don’t necessarily need or use, because either you just haven’t gone through it or you put it somewhere because you needed to save it, and then you never looked at it again, and the pile just keeps growing.

Step 1: Pick a room to start your cleaning process in. For example: bedroom, kitchen, office, etc.

Step 2: Choose a category to start cleaning, such as paper. It’s best to choose a category that is small so as to not become overwhelmed. Paper is a good choice because it’s doable in a relatively short amount of time, and can often make a big difference in the look of room, giving you an immediate feeling of accomplishment and cleanliness. If you choose something other than paper, make sure you don’t choose a category that it heavy and will tire you out at the beginning of the cleaning process.

Step 3: Start in the room you chose in step one and clean it of everything in the category (i.e. all the papers). Then move onto the next room, but continue to only clean the items in the same category. Continue moving on to the next room until you have cleaned everything in your category from all of the rooms in your house or apartment.

Step 4: Choose another category. Possible choices are clothes, books, or cosmetic products. Anything else that is small and that you tend to leave around in different rooms. Looking at clothes as an example, make sure you pick up any clothes you left on your bed, floor, chairs, exercise equipment, etc. and either fold it and put it in your dresser, hand it up, or put it in the laundry to be washed. Continue doing this with additional categories in each room until all the things that are small and easy to pick up and put away are taken care of.

Step 5: Examine your junk drawer. If you have avoided the junk drawer until this point, address it now. Most likely it contains some things from the categories you should already have finished, so take care of those first. Then figure out how to organize the things that are left. Common junk drawer items are paper clips, rubber bands, clothespins, scissors, etc. Small trays can be purchased on Amazon or stores like The Container Store, which will allow you to make your junk drawer neat, and instead of a junk drawer, it can become your kitchen or office supplies, or whatever you might want to call it, but the compartmentalized tray will allow you to have spaces for things that you may not know what to do with, but also use with some regularity.


Step 6: After you have cleaned all the easily movable items and you no longer have a junk drawer, you likely will have an issue of dust and other substances that need to be cleaned. Address them in the logical order. Vacuum first. Then clean the dust. Then get sponge and clean the dirt off of any surfaces.

Step 7: Enjoy your clean environment!