It never ends, does it? The kitchen is never clean for long. And the sink is never empty. You wish you had a magic wand that could make all the kitchen messes disappear every night. Cleaning up the kitchen is a dreaded everyday chore. You can’t escape it. And if you declare yourself on cleaning strike, the mess will be exponentially bigger tomorrow. It’s not a smart move.
Luckily, you are pretty efficient at cleaning up your kitchen. You already figured out your favorite brands for cleaners, a few time-saving hacks, and the most efficient way to load your dishwasher.
But you wonder if you can make kitchen cleaning faster.
Check out these seven tips for surprising ways you can fearlessly cut kitchen cleaning time.
1.Try out meal planning for huge cleaning time savings
Meal planning can be intimidating. However, the time-saving benefits are huge. You owe it to yourself to try it out. Yes, cooking for the whole week, or the whole month takes hours, but once you are done that’s it for the week or the month. Meal planning, besides cutting down on tens of hours of cooking, saves hours in kitchen clean up. Just imagine having your oven and cooktop always squeaky clean with only one cleaning a month!
2.Clean up these few kitchen tools right away
It’s annoying, right? You rush to get the meal on the table at a decent time so the kids can be in bed before 8PM. In the rush you leave all the tools, pots, and pans on the stove and counters. You finish dinner and you have piles of stuff waiting for you to clean. The food dried out on all those utensils and pans. You spend precious time scrubbing those utensils and wishing you could be doing something more fun, anything really. Super frustrating!
To dramatically cut down on cleaning time, clean these utensils right away:
- Chopping Knife
- Graters
- Juicer, food processors, and blenders
- Strainers
- Garlic press
- Whisk
- The most used tool that is a pain to clean for you
3. Clean up obnoxious spills as they occur
While we are talking about dried out food, we can’t forget about the dried out spills. It takes a split second –okay, a few split seconds- to clean them when they first happen. But once that stain is dry, you’ll have to scrub. And if one of your kids or -heaven forbid- you, accidentally step on that mess while it’s still in its liquid form, you’ll have 20 small messes. You’ll need the dreaded mop to clean that mess up.
4. Clean up the pan with burnt food tomorrow
Hopefully you are a much, much better cook than I am. When I turn the burner on, you can bet there will be something black in the bottom in 20 minutes. I’m even worse when I use the microwave. You can usually see me running towards the microwave and hitting “Cancel” five milliseconds after an explosion of marinara sauce covers all the walls of the microwave. Scraping burnt food from the bottom of pans takes a long time. A much faster way to do it is to take most the mess out and leave the pan in soapy water overnight.
5. Keep counters as clutter-free as possible
The fewer things you have on your counters, the faster you’ll be at cleaning them. It’s hard to keep the counters clear. There are things you use every day. The coffee maker, a bowl of fruit, and the phone are things that you can’t put away. But if you have your counters filled with cooking gadgets, spices, and decorative canisters, you are making cleaning more complicated than it needs to be. Use the cabinets or pantry to store less-often-used things that you keep on your countertops. Keep only the everyday stuff there.
6. Create an efficient weekly kitchen clean up to-do list
You are the expert here. You’ve been writing to-do lists since your first baby came into this world. Why don’t you create a to-clean list? You have a lot on your mind; you don’t need to add all the things you should clean. A to-clean list will also help you focus when you decide it’s time to clean. So go ahead, grab pen and paper, and make a list of the things you need to weekly clean in the kitchen.
7. Set a timer for extra speed
You don’t like to clean. Every night after dinner you try to postpone it. You drag your feet like a six-year-old that was just told to clean up his can’t-see-a-free-square-inch of carpet, full of dirty clothes and toys, room.
But it needs to be done.
So set a timer, try ten minutes first. During those ten minutes you can’t be bothered. If the phone rings, let it go to voicemail. If a text pops up on your phone, chose not to open it. For ten minutes just clean as fast and efficiently as you can. Then take a much deserved break. If there’s something left to clean -hopefully not, since you were so efficient-, set the timer for an extra five minutes.
Cleaning the kitchen is not in your top-ten fun things to do. You have a bazillion other things you’d rather do than spending time cleaning. So decide today to make cleaning the kitchen as efficient and fast as possible.
Go ahead, pick a couple of the time savers above and start claiming more of the evening for yourself and less for chores.
Author bio: Corina Semph is the talented designer behind Collected House Blog. She believes that everyone can have a home that is beautiful, comfortable and uncluttered, even if they haveoverly active kids. Get the FREE Guide 101 Stunning Ways to Add Color to Your Home, Even if You are Color Cautious.
