The smallest design decisions can have a huge impact on how you clean and maintain your home. How many hours a week do you spend cleaning the house? Maybe five hours or more? That’s just for the general clean-up that happens every weekend or so. But what about all the tiny things you do such as wipe the kitchen countertop after you cook and re-arrange the refrigerator after you throw away three packs of milk that have been rotting there?
The time you spend doing all those things can be spent taking a long luxurious bath instead, or reading a book, or enjoying a glass of wine. It’s bad enough that people are stressed out about their work but to have to deal with household chores is another matter. Have you ever thought of a way to make your house easy to clean? It’s not about keeping everything in place or setting a schedule when you should clean or cleaning the areas regularly. It’s about having a house designed to be easy to clean.
Placing the Duct Vents Near the Floor
A major home maintenance work is air duct cleaning. If you are renovating the home and thinking about having a centralized air-conditioning and heating system, then choose to install the duct nearer the floor since the duct work is usually located in the basement. Having the vents near the floor means that the air will travel a shorter distance than if the vents are nearer the ceiling. This will be an efficient use of the system.
Leave Enough Space Between the Toilet and the Wall
The toilet is easy to clean. However, what’s hard to clean is the space between the toilet and the wall. That tiny space is hard to reach. The solution is to leave as little space there as possible. Or, you can choose a toilet bowl that fastens to the wall. Either way, you need to be able to reach that space to keep your bathroom neat and clean.
Put Your Kitchen Appliances in Hideaways
You want your kitchen countertop neat, right? Is the solution to hide your microwave oven, toaster, blender, and coffeemaker? But in the morning, you’ll get these things out. It’s a waste of time. What you can do is create a pigeonhole-like hideaway atop your kitchen countertop. You can slide your kitchen appliances there and access them when you need to. These built-in hideaways are easy to clean since you only have to move the appliances around to reach the inside of the shelves.
Use Tiles for the Flooring Instead of Wood
Wood always looks better than ceramic tiles on the floor. However, wood also requires a lot of maintenance. No matter how you polish wood flooring regularly, it will need to be laminated again after a few years because it is susceptible to scratches. On the other hand, ceramic tiles only need to be wiped with a clean damp cloth. Once you allow the tiles to dry, they’re as good as new.
Choose to Have Glossy Paint on Your Walls
Many homeowners choose to apply matte paint on their walls because it looks better for certain styles and interior designs. However, it also attracts dirt and grime. It is harder to maintain than glossy or semi-glossy wall paint. With the latter, you only need a clean damp cloth to remove dust and even your kids’ “drawings.”
Get a Sofa That’s Wrapped in Leather or Vinyl
If you have kids in the house, they’ll throw an assortment of biscuits, chocolates, candies, and juices on the sofa. That will be hard to clean if your sofa has a cloth cover. So, choose a leather or vinyl sofa because this works wonders for homeowners on the go. You can simply wipe the sofa clean and it’s as if the “accident” never happened. This works well, too, for households with no kids but have very busy owners who do not have the time to wash and dry a sofa cover.
Remove the Tile Grout in the Bathroom
You can consider removing the grout from the bathroom tiles. The tile grout is that dense fluid that fills the gaps between the tiles. You can use concrete instead to make for an easier clean-up. Grouts collect molds, so removing them will also eliminate the presence of molds in the bathroom.
There are plenty of ways to make your home easy to clean. You can create a routine. You can do small chores every day, so the work won’t accumulate. But the best thing is to make your house simply easy to clean and maintain by rearranging the layout or choosing the right materials.
