I’ve just swept and mopped. Once the floor dries, I could easily go sweep again and turn up more dust and dirt. If I were to mop again, I’m almost certain the water in my bucket would be filthy. It feels like it’s never actually clean.
Beyond that, there’s dusting, cleaning windows, sinks, countertops, bathrooms, and probably things I don’t even consider. How do you all stay on top of these things?
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Bold of you to assume my home is clean.
You’re never going to be sterile; good enough is good enough.
Keep an abundance of cleaning supplies. Soaps and rags in the kitchen and the bathroom. Think about investing in a vacuum and a carpet cleaning machine. Edit = Also get more trash bins. One for the kitchen, one for the desk, one by the coffee table, one for the bathroom.
Some people find it easier to do one big push where they clean the whole house in one session; other folks like to do a little bit every day. Figure out which type you are.Also, check and see what cleaners charge in your area. It might be worth it to have a pro come in and do the work for you. Figure out what your leisure time is worth to you and then compare.
I’m the little bit everyday person. I’ll clean the bathrooms one day, then vacuum the floors the next. Wash clothes later in the week, something I need to do today.
I feel like doing a bit a day helps keep things cleaner than if I did it all at once. Things can appear overwhelming pretty quickly, at which point I won’t want to do it at all.
I’m a combination. If something looks bad I’ll get to it right away, and try to do a blitz once a week.
This is the way. I use Trello and have automated task creation on days and use its Kanban. Also a great habit to get into is if you walk into a room do one cleaning thing while you’re in it. Walk into a room and forget what you’re looking for. Take a moment to do some quick cleaning or organization. The little bit adds up and does not become overwhelming
I’m an all at once person and I also think that’s less clean. It’s easier for me to think about it like shaving: you’re more likely to have a grown out patch of hair if you do a big shave once a week vs a daily trim.
We got a service. We’ve two cats, a dog, and a toddler, and no family closeby to help with child care. We did the math and decided we needed the help. It’s fantastic.
I can’t believe no one has said this… Don’t wear shoes inside the house.
This will dramatically reduce the griminess of your floors.
Its a big commitment. You’ll prioritise shoes you can just slide your feet into, or at least out of. I still have nice boots and stuff but wear them less often.
As a Canadian, I still find it shocking that people don’t take their shoes off inside. That’s just gross.
It’s always the Brits and the yanks
Fuckin barbarians 😅
Its winter that makes it a necessity for us
To be fair, some people just aren’t that flexible and its a bit of a chore tying & untying laces.
How do those people wash their feet?
With difficulty?
If you can take them off to go to bed, you should be able to take them off earlier, at the door
But that’s why shoehorns exist?
Shoehorns tie laces?
No but with a shoehorn you can slip in and out of your shoes without tying the laces?
The laces are supposed to keep the shoes on your feet… Show horn with laces is just loosening their fit and kinda defeating the point yeah?
My floors are clean and warm enough for me to walk barefoot. I can’t imagine not taking of my shoes at home. I treat shoes as a necessary evil. Not even barefoot shoes give you the same comfort as just a bare foot. Can’t imagine not having the feeling in my life. Also, the airflow around my feet - wouldn’t want to spend more time than necessary in a closed shoe. I even wear slippers at work for this reason.
Yeah I can even feel dust on the floors with my bare feet, tells me when it’s time to vacuum.
If you’re sweeping, it’s possible you’re kicking a lot of dust up in the air, so that by the time you’re done mopping, it has resettled back down on the floor. You could mitigate this by vacuuming instead, or opening your windows and using fans to blow air out of your house. But also, you’ll never get all of the dust anyway.
In newer construction, especially high-rise apartments, there’s a lot less dust. But in older buildings, it’s just an endless torrent, and the solution has been…
Robot vacuums
While they must be maintained, and won’t work well if you’re not diligent about picking up and keeping obstacles off the floor, they make it far easier to keep the whole house clean by reducing the overall volume of interior dust and debris inside the building envelope.
To illustrate (this will be gross) I change the bags about every month and weigh them and it’s usually ~1 kg (~2 lbs) per bag, and each year they remove roughly 30-40 kg (70-90 lbs). And every time I’ve cut them open to see what’s causing all the weight (or make sure nothing important was eaten) it appears to be mostly dust and hair.
It’s freaky thinking how all of that would be floating around, settling on surfaces, collecting in corners and crevices, saturating carpets and upholstery, and of course getting breathed in constantly. Instead I don’t have to manually dust and vacuum very often and our indoor AQI is usually better than outside.
So yeah. Robots.
Edit: added imperial mass equivalents
Robots is great, but the privacy implications scare me.
I do have one that’s dumb, only just smart enough to set a daily schedule, no WiFi or cameras, but it’s bullet proof and easier to maintain than the others, so It’s possible to not sacrifice privacy.
What brand/model do you have? I’ve been looking into purchasing one.
Not the person you’ve replied to, but I’ve got a Roborock Q7 Max. It’s cheap and relatively simple. It’s got a LIDAR and proximity sensors, but no obstacle avoidance or stair/cliff detection and no camera. From what I can see it’s also silent (no network activity) even though it’s bound to my WiFi. After months of using it I’d say its been a great choice to splurge on. Never had one, never thought I’d need one, but after seeing dust settling on every bit of the floor every day… I got tired of sweeping.
That one’s a refurb iLife v3s. Not sure of current price but I paid $62.
I hear you. There’s always Valetudo. Get yourself a supported vacuum and install Valetudo whenever you feel the need. Had my robot for half a year but haven’t come around to doing it just yet. Maybe after its warranty runs out.
Ate there ones that aren’t loud? I work from home and never leave the house, and if robot vacuums are only ever used when you jagger the house, then they aren’t for me
We use a Neato Botvac Connected (it’s an older model) and the eco mode is quiet enough that we can run it at night. I’m an exceptionally light sleeper and it has worked for me. If we are leaving the house for a while I set it to turbo and that’s loud but cleans even better.
Highly recommend Neato. I think we’ve had ours for 7 or 8 years at this point.
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Keeping your house clean is a good thing to do. But it’s easy to stray into obsession territory. There lies madness.
Remember we all have far more visitor microbes in our bodies than our own host cells. Life is dirty. Life is germy. Embrace this.
You don’t need to live in a hoarder hell hole, but the sooner you accept that living is a messy business the more time you’ll have to enjoy actually living. Cleaning tasks should be quick and efficient, not sterilization.
Beyond that, there’s dusting, cleaning windows, sinks, countertops, bathrooms, and probably things I don’t even consider.
Of all the items you’ve listed, I personally rank floors as the most important to clean, followed by bathrooms, countertops, sinks, windows, and finally dusting. These are in order of which are used more frequently and how easily they’d be noticed. A dirty window (on the outside) is rarely dirty enough to outright block the sunlight, but grime on the floor will be tracked into other rooms, worsening the issue. Bathrooms are used daily, so would bother me if they’re not at least reasonably seemly.
For keep floor clean, the zeroth step is to prevent dirt and grime from coming in at the onset. A shoes-off policy in the home is probably the most substantial in this effort. That’s not to say you have to go barefoot – although I do think it’s quite nice – since indoor slippers or shoes are an option. The next step would be to rip out all wall-to-wall carpet, if possible. I have a full rant about the drawbacks of carpet, but it will suffice to say that carpet traps dust and dirt whereas hard surfaces like tile or laminate do not.
After that, you may need to identify what exactly is dirtying your floors. If it’s loose particulate (eg food crumbs), that’s going to need a different solution than if it’s loose hairs, which is different than dust or clothes threads. Crumbs or hair might suggest localized sweeping in the kitchen or bathroom will be most effective, while dust or threads suggest you need to adjust your clothes dryer settings, or your central air system needs a new/different filter.
The thing to keep in mind with all this is that grime does not come from nowhere: there is always a source, and the evidence will lead you to what’s most effective to keep your home maintained. Even if you conclude that the dust is fallout from the nearby coal-burning power station, there will still be things you can do, such as
campaigning for a fossil-fuel free worldelectrostatic air filters or keeping doors closed when not needed.I have a full rant about the drawbacks of carpet, but it will suffice to say that carpet traps dust and dirt whereas hard surfaces like tile or laminate do not.
Also, carpets wear, and generate dust themselves. Think of all the lint you find in a dryer, and compare the area of your clothing to the area of carpet.
I didn’t include it in my original comment because it’s kind of tangential, but carpets also trap rusty staples and – very strangely – rusty finish nails. Over six years, my feet have found dozens of these staples and nails twisted within my house’s carpet, each of a shape which I have never owned.
I honestly don’t know what the previous owners of this place did, but I recently had every shred of carpet ripped out and replaced with wood-look tile. I bought myself some indoor slippers for winter and haven’t looked back since.
I use the concept of “vectors”, but it’s basically what you’re saying. Floors are a primary vector, clean floors will help keep other things clean. Another example, you can think of say e-coli on your kitchen counter and see your cat as a vector for the e-coli to get from the litter box to the counter. Oh, dirty hands are another huge one.
I have a roomba to get rid of 80% every day. I strive to manually vacuum once a week, because the roomba doesn’t do corners and some hard to reach bits. Nor can it do stairs, obviously. After vacuuming I run a steam mop over the floors, which is amazing and SO much faster than regular mopping, without any cleaning agents.
Since its a combination steam mop/hand thing, I also use it for the windows. That’s not on any schedule, just when I think they’re dirty.
I wetwipe the countertop after I make dinner, and I clean it with soap whenever it looks dirty enough to be worth the effort.
Honestly, things like wooden floors can be hand-scrubbed four or five times before being actually clean, but it feel that anything that’s stuck on there after running the steam mop is probably not coming off during normal use, so it qualifies as clean enough.
What is a steam mop?
Apparently is called a “steam vapor cleaner”
I’d love a roomba but I’m horrified at the privacy nightmare hahaha
I have a rechargeable stick vac I use whenever the cat hair builds up too much.
I have the dumbest, non-mapping I could find. It works basically just as well as the 800 euro hypersmart ones
What brand/model do you have?
Eufy robovac 11s, but they probably don’t make those anymore
I have 2 dogs and a cat and have hard floors throughout. The roboVac runs twice per day and is always FULL when I empty it after every run. In addition my roboMop runs 3 days a week. My job at home is no longer cleaning but, roboTending 😂
But yes, taking off your shoes from outdoors is a must. We all keep a pair birks just for use inside.
I invested in a self emptying one. It empties the dustbin and automatically cleans the mop. I just have to dump the waste water every week or so, and fill up the clean.
There are robot mops now? Are there any that do not send your house floor plan to the company?
Most will still work without an internet connection, you just lose some of the QoL functionality. I believe some can also work with Home Assistant, for self hosting those functions. Unfortunately they generally require an initial internet connection to set up.
You need a meta robot that cares for your robot fleet.
So wait, you take your shoes off at the door, but your dogs (who invariably step in their own piss and shit), have free reign?
I pay someone to clean once a month. I hate cleaning and it’s worth the $200 to me.
I keep my sink clear of dishes and take out my own trash, but the rest is just stuff I don’t want to do.
What do they do? I’ve been thinking of getting a cleaning person but I just wonder how much they can do if they come once a week or every other week.
Like, I don’t think I have cleaned the windows in the 3.5 years I’ve lived in my previous apartment. And I absolutely do not want to waste money on someone cleaning windows more than once a year. I have to clean the kitchen every day at least once because I cook a lot and it’s a dirty mess and otherwise there is just no room to cook. I need the dishes, so the dishwasher is running once a day. I also have to at least sweep the kitchen floor once a day. The apartment floor is constantly dirty so I sweep here and there all the time too. It’s not very tidy in here, but we have a toddler and even if everything was super tidy it would stay that way for 15 mins max. Also it would take me longer to explain where stuff goes (we do have a lot of stuff) than to put it away myself or just surrender to untidiness. I don’t care if some vase or decoration has dust. I have a lot of laundry and no dryer so I cannot wait for a cleaner to come and do my laundry every other week.
So the only thing that is left that I can outsource is maybe the bathroom. But it then seems ridiculous to have a cleaning person come in to just clean the bathroom. (This is actually the room I enjoy cleaning the most, but I rarely get around to doing it.)
https://wecandoit.coop/services/
The cleaning person seems to take as long as it takes. The first time someone from there came, she was here for like 8 hours. Now that they come monthly it doesn’t need as much work.
I used to use another service but they weren’t great. More expensive, less cleaning, missed appointments, gig work nonsense.
Most formal cleaning companies will do a deep cleaning to form a clean baseline, or let you add on extras per session to address when you need. Usually it’s hourly based with a minimum time requirement. If you don’t need them to do something, it might work out to be cheaper if doing it would have put you over the minimum time.
If you find a self employed cleaning person, they are more likely to be more flexible and able to handle the odd tasks like tidying up or handling laundry. Maybe even help organize or do other routine tasks that you don’t have the bandwidth for.
I take a day off work occasionally to clean my apartment. It can be hard to remain motivated doing it on my own time during the weekend, but if it’s Monday during work hours it’s not so bad!
Preach. Also
Me eating ass: “don’t put clean dishes on the cat feeding counter, it gets bits on it!”
Vacuum. It sucks up the dirt and traps it.
Brooms & mops were from the ancient days before electricity existed, and as you’ve experienced, the dirt just keeps circulating and never goes away. Endless filth & frustration.
i don’t.
I have a mastiff. Truly clean will never be a thing again.
Roomba twice a day. A dishwasher run every day. A biweekly cleaning by a professional, and a tolerance for some degree of chaos. We live in the world, not in some clean lab. There will be dirt, dust, clutter. Just don’t let it get too much.
I have a yard of weeds, and a flower garden and a vegetable garden, some trees. It will never be a weed free environment in my gardens, I just try to advantage the plants I want, and keep the weeds under control not gone. Same with the house, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah can’t stop the weeds. Nature is gonna grow and you can’t stop it. Better to plant native plants and let them bunch up, less to maintain once established
Yep. I actually love the “lawn” we have, the mowed weeds are lush and green. I just also want vegetables. The flower garden looks fine with the weeds and as you say, the native plants are filling in nicely. And I put the veg in raised beds, dug out first so it’s not too bad. But with any real world situation it’s not going to be perfect and pristine.
Set a weekly cleaning day and stick to it. On weeks when you can’t clean on that day, move it to a different day. Don’t skip.
And no shoes inside, ever. Tracks in lots of filth, even when you think you have clean shoes.
