hey girls! i know a lot of topics pop up about how we keep our homes / apartments clean and i wanted to share this website:
flylady.com
my girlfrind told me about it last month and i've been fascinated with it ever since. sign up for the daily e.mail (hint: have the messages grouped into ONE email or you'll be bombarded with "reminders" all day long) she has some really great tips and techniques and if you're really clueless you can start with the "babysteps" which help build habits. i swear... i'm a pretty clean and neat person to begin with but my house is really clean all the time now and i'm spending less time actually cleaning. each day she'll have a "mission" in the e.mail as well. it's a short, 15-minute task and it's usually a task NOT at the top of my priority list — like wiping down your front door and sweeping your front porch or cleaning out your silverware drawer. some of it's a bit silly, but most of it is really useful, good information.
Heh. A friend of mine was into the FlyLady for a while. About the only tip I remember was keeping the kitchen sink really clean and free of dirty dishes. Now that I have a dishwasher, I find I am really obnoxious about the dirty dishes being hidden in the DW instead of on the sink or counter.
Another genius tip I picked up from someplace else: the better your doormats, the cleaner your floors. Get really good, large mats - even commercial type - for just outside every exterior door. A second mat right inside the door isn't a bad idea either. The goal is to prevent the dirt from making it inside...so you don't have to clean as much.
The one thing I swear by: I keep a basket inside the front door for recycling the newspaper, the junk mail, the flyers people leave on your doorstep, and all the rest. Like the doormat thing, stopping the papers from actually penetrating the house is the idea. It helps a lot. (I have an old wire basket that a milkman would use for deliveries.)