Carpets & Flooring
CRI Articles
IEHA Articles
IICRC Articles
Features
When all you want to do is get the house clean, you’re probably not too focused on getting organized. There are surfaces to dust, floors to mop and bathrooms to scrub. There’s no time to get things all lined up in a row, right?
Wrong. Getting organized and cleaning house are linked together. You simply can’t do one right without tackling the other. There isn’t any easy way to dust over, under and around clutter. You can’t vacuum if there are piles of toys, shoes and newspapers scattered about the floor. Likewise, it is pretty hard to organize your house without pulling out a dust cloth or broom. As you move clutter, you are bound to find dust bunnies floating about.
Once you decide to conquer a space, and get to work, you may find that tidying up can make you downright blue. You pick things up at the same rate that family members set things down. It seems as if you’ll never get everything put away so that you can actually clean house.
What you need are some “slippery surfaces.” We’re not talking about an excess of lemon furniture polish. We’re talking about a mental technique that can help you conquer clutter.
“We need to imagine our surfaces as slippery. If they were as slick as ice, or tilted just a few degrees, nothing would be able to stay on them for very long,” writes Francine Jay, author of “The Joy of Less: A Minimalist Living Guide” which focuses on how to declutter, organize and simplify your life.
In her book, Jay, also known as Miss Minimalist, explains how our imaginary slippery surface works.
“Everything we place on our 'slippery' surfaces leaves with us when we leave the room. If we put a cup on the coffee table, a book on an end table or a craft project on the dining table, we pick it up and take it with us when we make our exit - and encourage family members to do the same," she said.
Not only can you imagine countertops, end tables and coffee tables as slippery, there are plenty of other surfaces in homes that gather clutter. Imagine if nothing could land on and stick to your kitchen table, desktop, the top of your dryer or the floor of your closet.
Get a jumpstart on making house cleaning chores easier by mentally making surfaces slippery. If the items don’t belong on that table, picture them sliding off and you putting them where they belong.
Concentrate on one area or room at a time. Bouncing from space to space is both tiring and inefficient. Stick to one spot because at the end of your work, you want something to show for it. Grab a basket and collect all of the items from your “slippery” surfaces in that space and take them and put them away where they belong. As you do so, evaluate if you really need to keep those items. The less you own, the easier it is to stay organized.
As surfaces and floors get decluttered, you’ll find it is fast and easy to dust, vacuum and mop.
“After we’ve made the effort to declutter our surfaces, we have great incentive to keep them that way,” said Jay, who writes about living with less. “Who wants to repeat all that hard work,” she asks.
