Of course, this will only be an appearance of order. But the main thing now is to make a good impression. And general cleaning – real, epic – can be done later.
Russians keep a lot of unnecessary things in their apartment. According to a Procter & Gamble study, most keep them in a closet (37% of respondents) or on a balcony (36% of respondents). Some take them to relatives (20%), to the dacha (14%) or take them to the garage (11%). Anyway, all this stuff creates a mess in the house. How to clean up an apartment quickly? For example, in half an hour? We tell the journalist Wday.ru.
My mom loves guests. No not like this. My mother loves guests very much.
I can call her at 7:30 in the morning, and a friend will already be sitting in her kitchen, who decided to drop in for coffee on the way from the night shift. I can call her twice more with a difference of several hours, and she will have guests again, each time different.
And she is always ready to accept them. Give her half an hour, and she will have the table set and the apartment cleaned. I am up to her talents as walking to the moon. But in 30 minutes I can now also create the illusion of perfect order in a three-room apartment. To do this, it is enough to mentally plot the route of your guests around the apartment. Go!
So, your buddies are in the hallway. They hadn’t even had time to look around, but already smelled. Every house has its own aroma. And I would not want people to associate your apartment with sweaty feet, burnt porridge or a cat litter box.
To avoid this, we open all the vents. We arrange capital ventilation for the apartment. We clean up after the animals.
If people smoke in the apartment, shake out the ashtrays. Well, if you have a moisturizer, you can add a few drops of scented oil to it. Or add a couple of drops to a spray bottle with plain water and spray in the hallway. Scented candles can be lit in the room. But what not to do is generously water the apartment with a toilet air freshener. Believe me, the guests will immediately understand what it smells like.
In the same hallway, look around. Extra shoes – in a drawer, extra jackets – from hooks into a closet. You will wash, arrange in pairs later. Now what is important is not what is hidden from prying eyes, but what is in their sight. It is better to take out the slippers, so that later, when guests, do not dig into the heap of shoes, and free a couple of hangers or hooks under their outer clothing. Do not forget to wipe the mirror, they will surely look into it.
No matter how the visit of the guests develops, but 99 percent of 100 that there is a place that they will definitely visit. This is a bathroom. Of course, they won’t take a shower, but washing your hands before tea and going to the toilet on the path is sacred. And the toilet, as you know, is the face of the hostess. So we quickly put things in order here.
We push the shutter of the bathtub, close the doors to the shower stall, if there is one. We put children’s toys with which they play in the bath. Pour the cleaning agent into the toilet – we have a few minutes, it will have time to work. During this time, we quickly wipe the chrome elements – a faucet, a toilet paper holder, a toilet flush button, a soap dish. If you have a melamine sponge, use it: it will provide perfect results in no time.
We wipe the sink. Sorry to say this, but still: we make sure that there is no hair in the plums. We throw out used discs, cotton swabs, empty cans. Be sure to wipe the mirror: your guests want to see their reflection, not toothpaste splashes. We wash off the product in the toilet, at the same time we wipe the toilet seat, bezel, toilet with a damp cloth, for example, or a disposable towel. We rinse the brush.
We check that there is a dry hand towel and that there is enough toilet paper. If there is a litter box in the litter box, change the litter box. Do not forget to close the dirty laundry basket. If you have it without a lid, then throw it into the washing machine. Sort it later when the guests are gone.
Friendly express get-togethers usually take place in the kitchen. And here you have to work hard, especially if you just cooked dinner for a large family and did not have time to clean up after yourself.
The first thing that spoils the impression is dirty dishes. If there is a dishwasher, quickly put everything there. Do you wash with your hands? Then you leave only small things in the sink – cups, spoons. Something that can be washed quickly and what you may need. Put the rest of the dishes in a basin and take them out to the balcony. Or put it in the closet. The main thing is not to forget about it later. Or, on the contrary, wash the most voluminous, carefully put the rest in the sink. After all, you are not a robot and you cannot do everything.
The next kitchen stage is clean tables. We quickly wipe the surfaces, brush off the crumbs. We change towels.
Time left? We wipe the stove (as a last resort, put pots on it). And, if possible, we rake the surfaces of the tables in the working area. Excess items can be temporarily shoved into one of the boxes. And the fewer objects in sight, the cleaner the kitchen looks.
And one more thing: if you have glossy facades, and the sun is outside the window, they will have to be wiped clean. Otherwise, fingerprints and splashes will ruin the experience.
What if you decide to sit in one of the living rooms? There, first of all, you need to get rid of external sloppiness: collect scattered things, take away small garbage – candy wrappers, pieces of paper. Mugs if you drank tea in front of the TV. If there are a lot of things (maybe you decided to sort out the closet and all the clothes are in a heap on the sofa), we take them in an armful and take them to another room, where we will not let anyone later, even on pain of death. We also transfer the dryer with linen there.
If there are a lot of little things, take a box and dump everything into it. Take the box to another room or place it under the table.
Free the surfaces? Now we quickly wipe dust and furniture if there are animals in the house. It is advisable to walk on the sofa and chairs with a roller so that the guests do not carry away a little cat or dog hair.
And finally, the floor. We do not ask you to wash it. But at least to vacuum – collect crumbs, sand from shoes, wool, food residues.
All of the above will take you no more than 25 minutes. Another 5 – to put yourself in order. But now you can meet guests. Just make sure you don’t forget to hide all your household equipment first. Let them think that you are always so neat.