The Lazy Genius Podcast - #156 - How to Clean the House When Everyone Is Inside It (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Last week, I shared ten principles of lived-in cleaning, but today, we’re diving into the specifics. Laundry, tidying, bathrooms, dusting and all the things. Just how do we keep our homes clean when everyone is in it all of the time? Let’s jump in. Helpful Companion Links We talked about the 10 principles of lived-in cleaning last week, revisit that episode (or catch up on it) here. Here are the most popular cleaning episodes from The Lazy Genius back catalog: laundry, laundry updated, and how to start a cleaning routine. Looking to get rid of some stuff? Listen to The Lazy Genius House Purge. Tackling the bathroom? Here’s how The Lazy Genius Cleans the Bathroom. Here’s an affiliate link to my beloved Dyson vacuum. Cordless vacuums are worth their weight in gold. The next Latest Lazy Letter goes out Wednesday where I talk all about what I’m reading, watching and listening to. Hop on the VIP mailing list if you’re interested in receiving it. Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 156 and it's part two of our little mini series, How to Clean the House when everyone is inside it. Last week I shared 10 principles of lived in cleaning. So listen to that episode if you haven't yet. It gives a great foundation for today's episode where we will tackle some specifics. laundry, tidying, bathrooms, dusting, and floors. Let's jump in. First up, laundry. I'm not sure why

there's so much more than usual. Maybe it's the spring weather for some of us that's like cold in the morning, but warm in the afternoon, which means lots of kid wardrobe changes, so many piles of pants. Maybe we're all outside more in general and getting dirty more often. Or maybe the piles just feel larger, like dirty piles and clean piles because there's so much more to manage in the home than before. So here are my laundry tips. First, do a laundry day. Your home, you're already there all day. Choose one day a week and make it laundry day for as long as everyone is at home. Some of you have shared with me in the past your reluctance to do a laundry day because it feels confining. Well, we are legitimately confined right now, so you might as well lean into it.

I have two entire episodes about how to create a laundry day that I will link to in the show notes. But here are the quick benefits. One, you do it all in one day. And then you don't think about it again for another week. Parades. Number two, you don't do any other chores as much as possible on laundry day. It's just laundry day. So there's no getting distracted and forgetting about a load that sits in the washer for seven hours.

Number three, everyone in the house is, can actually help. Your family gathers every dirty item of clothing from far and wide. You sort at the lazy genius way, which I share in those laundry episodes, and I'll tell you just a tidbit in just a second. And then you all work on folding and putting away the laundry as it's clean. It's the built-in productive activity for the day. It's not crammed into the cracks of the day, but it's already filled with everything else. So that is my biggest suggestion for doing laundry when everyone else is home. Have a laundry day. Another laundry tip, whether you use it for laundry day or not, is to wash, not based on color, but based on where the clothes will end up. This is the lazy, genius way to sort

laundry. If you're going to do laundry, let's say every other day, you know, like you do a load every other day. Please do not go around your house grabbing random handfuls of like, blue and black clothing, those random handfuls, while the same general color, which is how we have been trained to do laundry, they include clothes from all your people from all over your house, and that means they have to be put away all over your house. That is one of the ways laundry is the worst. One load, it means trips to like three or four different rooms and seven or ten different drawers. So as much as you can make each load contain clothes that exist mostly in the same space. Again, lots of info in those two laundry episodes. Next up, let's tackle tidying. So tidying is just

putting stuff away. But with everyone home all the time, like doing more activities than usual, there's just more stuff that's out more often. Now, I shared this in last week's episode, but one helpful thing as much as you and your people are able to do it is to clean up one mess before starting another one. That is fairly basic and agreeable to most people, but sometimes real life does not have clearly delineated messes. In that case, try this. Simply tidy the places that matter most once a day, just once. A tidy is a reset. Everything is put in its place. You definitely need at least one reset a day. I feel pretty confident in that. But here are a couple of thoughts to make that happen practically. It's all about the three T's. You ready? Pick a time,

pick a territory, pick a team. Okay, so first pick a time. Choose one time a day that is relatively consistent every day that you tidy and you reset. We have three main times. We've built up to three main times. And some days, most days we do all three. Some days we just make two. It depends the house and what's going on. But those times are before lunch, before afternoon screen time, so that when I'm alone for a little bit and I'm cooking dinner, the visual clutter of the house isn't an issue for me personally and I can enjoy it more. And then the third time is before bed. Now, the before bed time is the easiest most days because the kids don't do a ton of damage between like pre-dinner screen time and bed. So those are our personal times. Now, because those are the

times that we tidy, I don't stress out too much about the state of things during the rest of the day. It's not time for a tidy yet. Messes are meant to be made. It makes the whole thing feel less overwhelming because you know a tidy is eventually coming and everyone more or less expects it. It's just less stressful. Okay, the second T, pick a territory. The entire house won't be tidy all at once, pretty much ever. It just won't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't think that's a realistic expectation. So pick your daily territory. It's likely a kitchen and like a main living area or maybe it's your bedroom so that you'll stay sane when you go to bed to relax. Or it's a kid's room that just gets to like natural disaster conditions in a blank.

You choose. Pick your territory. And you can even pick different territories every day, right, based on what you need. So knowing that you've done that, like just mentally knowing that you've done that, it helps you release the pressure to tidy other spaces. They are not today's territory. And that's totally great. Okay. And then the 13th, pick a team. If you live with other humans, please do this together. The afternoon tidy is always a family tidy. Now, some of the others are too, but I've mentioned this before in several places. We, we scream like family tidy or family pickup, and then we play a fun song really loudly. And we tidy. And we tidy. until the song is over. It rarely takes more than one song to get everything done, honestly. Mostly because

we're just like hitting the clean up one mess before you make another one rule about like 70% of the time. So it's not like awful. Sometimes it's awful. But then we just play another song and it's fine. And if you find that there's just too much stuff that continuously tidying is too hard because of everything that is always out, you might have a bit of a stuff problem. I talk. I talk. I talk a little bit about that in last week's episode if you want to go back. And you can listen to episode number 78 called The Lazy Genius House Purge if you're feeling the itch to get rid of all your stuff. Don't do that, please. Spoiler on that episode. Don't do that. We don't want to do that. Okay. Next up, let's talk about bathrooms. How do you clean the bathrooms when everyone is always home?

All right. The problem here is twofold. It's a time thing, right? Cleaning the bathrooms, feels like such an annoying time-consuming chore, and you don't want to spend your time doing it. The other aspect to the problem is that with everyone home, the bathroom gets grosser faster. Like a lot grosser if you're at my house. The boys are just like, I mean, they're just gross. So first thing, there is a really great order to cleaning the bathroom. I did a whole episode called The Lazy Janeis Cleans the Bathroom that I will link to in the show notes. But here is your most important tip. You're not ready. dust the bathroom before you spray it down. I've heard from so many people ever since that episode

aired that that single tip has saved them multiple times. So in terms of like cleaning the bathroom, listen to that episode for details. And if you don't have time for that, I'm just, I'll give you the quick overview order of like the best order to clean the bathroom. But I'm telling you, you dust your surfaces, friends. That's why like, you know, when you spray the, the stuff on the sink and you start to wipe it. And then it's just like clumps of like gray. Just populate the sink in the toilet. And you're like, what, where did this come from? It's dust. It's dust. And you just got it wet. So dust the bathroom first. Okay. So here's your order for the bathroom. Pull everything out of the bathroom. Number one. Number two, dust it. Not with like

pledge, just with a dry rag. Number three, spray the tub. Shower. and toilets to start soaking. Number four, swiffer or sweep the floor. Number five, clean the surfaces in this order. Mirrors, sinks, toilets, and showers. Number five, mop, and then number six, put everything back. Again, a whole episode on it. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road? That's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tiguan, you deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more. SUVw, German engineered for all.

Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay. So for the sake of everyone being in the house, there are four things that I think will save your bathroom from becoming too gross too fast. Number one, dust it. Okay. So every couple of days,

grab like an old sock or like if you've got laundry, dirty laundry hampers in your bathroom, like grab like a t-shirt that's dirty. It doesn't matter. I do have a few like old socks in our laundry room with all the cleaning stuff that we'll use. A sock is like such a great quick duster. And again, one of the reasons the bathroom feels gross is because it collects dust like any other room in the house, but that dust then also collects like the grime of the bathroom. And that's why everything is dull and filmy and gross. So dust. Don't feel like you have to clean the whole shebang. Just dust the sinks, maybe the seat in the top of the toilet, as often as you think about it. And since this isn't really a detailed like cleaning task, it's an easy one to give to kids. kids put socks on their hands and let them go at it. If they miss a spot, who cares? Anything helps.

Second tip, rinse out the toothpaste in the sink every single time you brush your teeth. If your kids leave globs, call them back and have them rinse it out. Again, what is it with kids in toothpaste? I've talked about this on Instagram before. I don't understand it. I don't understand how children and toothpaste, how, I just, I don't understand. I have no words. I have no words. that single focus of like rinsing the toothpaste out of the sink, it can make a huge difference in how clean or dirty the bathroom feels. Third tip, keep the bathroom mostly tidy. Tissues don't land in the trash can and are left on the floor, right? The hand towel, it never finds its way back to the hook. Somebody left a pair of shoes in there. There's also like your cocktail muddler for some

inexplicable reason. Chances are your bathroom is fairly small and not full of a ton of stuff even when it's messy. So it's a really easy room to keep tidy. Less than a minute can have you back to zero. So if your bathroom is driving you crazy, third trick, keep it tidy. And then the fourth is to have your boys pee in the water. If you have elementary age boys or maybe any age, I don't know, mine are in elementary school. There's, there's pee just, like there's pee everywhere. So telling them to pee in the water, it really helps. Like, aim for them. Aim for. And, the water. That keeps the splashing at a minimum and you avoid like those fun surprises you find when you clean the toilet and you want to throw up and then burn your house down. So that fourth one's

kind of a bonus for a very specific population. But tip four, pee in the water. All right. Then when you have time to actually clean a bathroom, the dusting, toothpaste rinsing and tidying, it will likely give you like quite a leg up and getting it done. Again, listen to my bathroom episode. I have a weird superpower of figuring out the best order to clean stuff. So trust me on this. Okay, so we've done laundry, tidying and bathrooms. Dusting and floors are left. So dusting. Everything, it does feel really dusty. Again, dusting is not a perfection chore, right? Good enough is totally good enough. Remember that principle from last week? So here's what you do. Try anywhere from like once a day to once a week or once you think about it.

put a sock on everybody's hands you line those hands up you get your bottle of dust cleaner pledge or whatever and you spray down the line of socked hands skip the cleaner if you want to uh the socks do a pretty good job on their own if you want and then you give everyone a territory and sound the bell again dusting is nice when it's done perfectly like when everything is picked up when you can you can't see the line of where you stopped it is nice i get it sometimes it's something shines into my living room and it's very clear what has not been dusted in weeks. But again, we're going for what works here. Right now, most of us are doing nothing. We're just trying to make it because everything feels too overwhelming. So having a mediocre dust job done by your socked children

is better than nothing. Plus it gives them something to do. Right. And then finally, floors. The daily accumulation of crumbs is something else. Plus our kids are in and out of the house all the time, which is great, but there's also like dirt and stuff tracked in from that. The floors are a situation. So a couple of things for the way life is right now when everyone is at home. If you're not yet a house that takes off your shoes when you come inside, consider becoming one just for like quarantine times. It actually makes a really big difference. Next tip is to sweep, sweep sweep or swiffer or vacuum your choice the most commonly dirty part of the floor as often as you think about it um as i have mentioned before we have sort of like an l-shaped main living area with like

kitchen and eating area in the living room that part of the house has the dirtiest floors by a factor of ten it's where the food and dirt from coming in the back door both live their best lives so the floor it's always dirty in there. So here is a quick thing to remember. Your tools and the location of those tools both make a big difference in this kind of scenario in a high traffic situation. So consider maybe your vacuum is just too far from the dirties part of your house. I don't know. Or maybe you need to look into getting a better vacuum that you haven't had since you inherited it when you got your first apartment. Tools and where you keep them matter here. So, We have a little broom closet off the kitchen with all the floor tools.

That's all that's in there. We love our vacuum. It is a Dyson V7, I think is the number. It's like cordless is the point. So cause or me or even the kids sometimes, we'll just whip it out and vacuum the kitchen and under the table really quickly. We do that at least twice a day in that little main space. It takes two seconds because it's right there, right?

Now mopping, mopping is a different animal. I mopped that same L-shaped floor last week for the first time since all this coronavirus happened. And it's because Cause took the kids to a walking trail for an hour. So I took that hour to tidy, I mop the floor. Would I have enjoyed that hour more if I had just sat in red, probably. Would I have been irresponsible for choosing to read instead of mop? No, not at all. Now I will say high energy music does make a difference in the situation. At least it did for me. And now the floor is mopped. I chose to mop the floor. And guess what?

I don't have to think about it again for weeks. Those mopped floors have contributed to the main area of the house feeling way more clean than it is. And it was totally worth spending my hour on. Now again, if you choose to spend your hour differently or if I had chosen to spend my hour differently, no sweat. We all get to decide what we need in the moment, right? I do often remember something I heard from the Nestor years ago that she doesn't like cleaning, but she does like the way she and the house feel after she's done. So sometimes we have to take a future mindset when it comes to cleaning to get any sense of motivation at all. Sometimes it's harder to get that activated than other days, you know, just remember you're not a terrible person for choosing to sit.

instead of clean. So in summary, the overarching thought from your Instagram comments the other week is that cleaning, it just doesn't feel like it does anything because stuff gets dirty again. True. This is very true. But sometimes there is a difference in having nothing cleaned for eight weeks as opposed to one, right? There is a continuum of dirty. And you might be feeling the angst over your because you're not happy with good enough being good enough, but kind of dirty, it might be better than disgusting. That's not a shaming thing. That is an invitation to live in a dirty house

that feels a little better than the really dirty house you're in now. So maybe these few ideas, whichever you choose to try out, it could make a difference in the level of dirty and how you experience your house because of it. So in this case, tiny moves, right? Really small steps. Things that feel like you're adding a drop to the ocean, they do actually make a big difference. We've still got weeks left of this. So pick one thing from this episode to try. And remember the 10 principles of lived in cleaning from last week. You can do this. Or, I mean, come on, don't do it. It's your life. Like, it's your life. It's your house. know what you need more than I do. So if worrying about a clean house is low on the list, dude, keep it dirty. Like you're the boss. These are just some ideas that you can use whenever you might

be ready for them. All right. That is it for today. Thank you so much for listening. P.S. My Monthly newsletter, the latest lazy letter. It goes out this Wednesday just in a couple days. So if you would like to get a little more lazy genius in your inbox, head to the lazy genius collective.com slash join to get it. All right, until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast

called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.