Does it seem like every month you have to do a deep cleaning of the kitchen just to make it sanitary and keep it looking like a place you would feel comfortable using to prepare food in?
The kitchen can get pretty nasty at times, but there are a few things you can do to make it easier to clean and keep it looking tidy for longer.
1. Clean as You Go
The best advice for keeping a clean and sanitary kitchen is to do a little cleaning whenever you are working in the kitchen.
Are you just making a sandwich? Wipe down the counters afterward to get all the crumbs and sweep the floor to get rid of the remainder.
Are you making a pot of soup on the stove? Wipe down the stovetop when you are finished.
One of the best ways to clean as you go and save yourself some work is to fill the sink with soapy water and place your dirty dishes there.
As you cook and dirty up some of the cookware, you can rinse down the used dishes and then let them soak in the dishwater.
By the time you get to washing the dishes, they should be really easy to clean.
You can also clean as you go by tidying up as you leave food to cook on the stove or in the oven. You may have a few minutes in between cooking tasks where you aren’t really doing anything.
You can use that time to wipe down counters, wash dishes, and sweep floors.
You will create a cleaning habit that helps you stay on top of any mess in the kitchen, getting it tidied up before it becomes a bigger problem.
You will also be helping to keep pests at bay. This single kitchen habit will drastically change your workload, making it seem like the kitchen is a breeze to clean.
2. Deep Clean the Appliances
The oven and fridge are probably your two biggest culprits in the kitchen for dirty appliances. These get used a lot but probably don’t get cleaned a lot.
If you want to keep them looking pretty clean, you should be deep cleaning them 3-4 times a year, or more as needed.
To make that job less taxing, do a little wiping down every week or as you see the appliances need it.
Maybe you dread deep cleaning your appliances, and that laborious task can be handled by professional cleaners, if you wish.
They can take care of the hard work so that you don’t have to lift a finger, and they will probably get better results too.
Deep cleaning these parts of the kitchen is essential if you are going to keep a tidy looking kitchen that doesn’t need to be cleaned as often.
It also makes the appliances more sanitary, reducing the risk of germs and bacteria getting into your food.
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3. Make a Cleaning Checklist for Each Week
Tidying up the kitchen can seem like a big job if you never do any regular cleaning there.
However, if you make a cleaning checklist for daily and weekly chores, you can stay on top of this room and keep it from becoming a major cleaning chore.
For daily tasks, you can add things like wash dishes, sweep floors, and wipe down counters.
These are tasks that need to be done every day so that any mess in the kitchen doesn’t get out of control.
For weekly chores, you could add to your list cleaning the microwave, wiping down the outside of appliances, arranging the cupboards, mopping the floor, and washing the windows.
If you do all that, you won’t have nearly as much to do when it comes time to deep clean the entire kitchen.
Other chores that take longer, like cleaning the oven, cleaning the mats, and cleaning behind and under appliances may be saved for doing once a month.
4. Clean Your Appliances the Easy Way
There are a couple of appliances that are a pain to clean if you do it by hand and don’t know any shortcut methods- the microwave and the oven.
However, I want to share my handy shortcuts, and that’s to place a cleaning solution inside the appliances and let that do its work.
For the microwave, you can heat up a cup of water or water with some lemon juice in it.
This makes the walls of the microwave wet and loosens the grime stuck there so that most of it should wipe off.
For the oven, you can mix together a solution of ½ cup baking soda, 1/3 cup of water, and 1/3 cup of white vinegar.
Just leave that in the oven overnight and then check on it in the morning.
You should find that the solution has worked through the oven and made everything easier to clean. Do not heat up the oven with this solution inside, though.
5. Keep a Lid on the Trash
When cleaning in the kitchen, you may come across insects or lizard droppings.
If you want to spend less time cleaning these up, then make sure that there is a lid on the garbage bin and keep that tightly closed.
This will attract fewer pests and give you less to clean up in the kitchen.
6. Use a Vacuum where Possible
Are you used to cleaning out the crumbs in your cupboards by hand? Try using the vacuum cleaner and its hose attachment to clean the cupboards instead.
This could save you a lot of time and actually clean up the crumbs and other debris better than you could clean by hand.
Your vacuum’s attachments can get into those hard-to-reach places that you have trouble getting to by hand.
With these cleaning tips, your kitchen should look cleaner all the time and not take as long to clean when you have set aside time for studying it up.
Why let it stress you out when you could take less effort to clean your kitchen?
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