Keeping your home clean is as simple as 1, 2, 3...

Spring is here and like many of you, I am spending some of my free time doing spring cleaning, inside and out. This month, here are my tips on how to keep your home tidy and limit the hours that you may spend on cleaning this time of the year. By doing these small steps, you may find that the impossible clean house dream is not that far away.

1) Limit your knickknacks. By not compulsively decorating every table, shelf and wall space, you limit the amount of cleaning and dusting that you have to actually do. Keep your decor items to a minimum and you will find you have less to dust.

2) Tidy up right away. People with clean homes have a habit of cleaning up a little at a time. When they take something out, they put it away immediately when they are finished. These are the same people who will tidy up their kitchens as they cook. If you leave it to the next day, it will just accumulate and you will probably end up with a bigger mess than when you started. Mess begets mess.

3) Go paperless. With the advent of online banking, online tax filing, computer backups, and paperless magazines and books, there is no more excuse to keep paper. You are actually greener when you opt for online, and avoid paper. Recycle or shred your older files. Don’t hang on to papers that have no value. Go through your books and if you don’t have a strong emotional connection and you know that you will never open it again, give the book away. This will also reduce the amount of dusting that you will do for the tons of books that you no longer need or want.

4) Limit your pillow purchases. I personally find this tip the hardest to follow. My weakness will always be pillows because they are so pretty and interesting and they are so easy to use to add texture and color to a decor. However, I understand the reasoning behind this tip. Just think, if not correctly placed on the sofa or the bed, where do they end up? On the floor, and this contributes to the messy factor again. I can assure you that you don’t actually need those 34 pillows on your bed.

5) Don’t clean all at once. People with clean houses generally do not spend one or two days cleaning, they clean every day, a little bit at a time. It is less of a burden to clean a little every day than saving it all for one day and getting exhausted.

6) Don’t use your floors as storage spaces. Storage baskets on the floor in the living room or keeping things under the bed will create more places that dust bunnies will accumulate. As well, by storing papers or dropping a bag on the floor, your home will feel messier.

7) Multi-tasking makes cleaning more fun. Be super productive and do two things at once. While vacuuming, slap on your weekly face mask. While folding clothes, get through an episode of your favourite TV series that you never have time to watch. While doing the dishes, listen to part of the audio book that you never find the time for.

8) Take off your shoes at the entrance. In many eastern cultures, it is considered bad manners to keep your shoes on in a home where you are the guest. This principle should apply to your own home. There is a very good reason for this, you want to limit the dust and dirt from the outside tracking into the house. This also makes cleaning up easier, the less dirt tracked in from the outside, the less messy your floors will become.

9) Clean a little every day. This is similar advice as number 5. However, I would add to set out a list of all your weekly chores (dusting, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms) and spread it out over the week. This way, it becomes part of your routine and you avoid those dreaded Saturdays filled with cleaning.

10) Close the garage door. Same principle as number 8, limit the dirt and dust from roads and driveways being tracked into your garage. By leaving your garage door open, wind will blow all sorts of stuff into your garage and you will end up with a bigger mess.

- Tayna Bardati is an Interior Designer and Home Staging Expert in Bromont (www.creationstayna.com), follow on Facebook @ Tayna Bardati Home Staging, or on twitter #deco21girl.