Your Guide to Apartment Cleaning

Cleaning may not be everyone’s favourite chore, or the most entertaining one, but is still a very important task for maintaining your home. While it’s not something you have to do every weekend, a deep, thorough scrub down of your place should be a semi-regular occurrence to maintain a clean space. With that, we’ve compiled a guide to apartment cleaning and some helpful tips (and reminders) for keeping your home spick and span!

1) Starting from the top, literally

When cleaning, it’s very important to remember that gravity can either be your friend or enemy. To prevent yourself from dropping dirt and dust onto surfaces that have already been washed, it’s best to start your chores from the top and move down. This means that if you start with the top shelves, ceiling fans, tops of appliances, etc. it will make the whole task more efficient. Dropping dirt onto the lower levels is unpreventable, so it’s best to make sure you’re dropping it onto surfaces you haven’t already cleaned.

2) Deep clean those closets (and make them easy to clean later!)

Once in use, closets become an extremely frustrating and difficult area to clean. Since these spaces are often designated for storage, they can begin to pile up with your belongings and may not get the same attention other spaces in your home will. Be sure that when you do get to your closet, do a deep, thorough clean, getting into those crevices, vacuuming along the baseboards, and wiping down the shelves too. Adding effective storage solutions can also help with keeping your closet neat (and make it easier to clean later). Boxes, drawers, and hangers are all places to start when keeping your closet organized and easy to empty for cleaning purposes.

3) Don’t forget the bathroom

Maybe not the most fun place to clean, your bathroom is a prime place to give a good, thorough scrub down. Taking the time to give proper attention to surfaces like your bathtub, toilet seat, toilet bowl, shower walls, sink, and faucets is vital to maintaining a well kept bathroom running. Your bathroom can be the perfect place for mold and germs to live, so keeping it clean is imperative! The usual bathroom sprays and gels should do the trick, but if you’re a little more environmentally concerned, you can use a mixture of equal parts baking soda, borax, and kosher salt to make a good cleaning scrub.

4) Clean those appliances

Kitchen appliances are another key focus for your big scrub down. If you have a dishwasher, get some vinegar in a cup and place it on the top rack. Then, run the dishwasher through a cycle on Hot (if you have the option). Afterwards, follow up with some baking soda on the bottom, again on Hot. This’ll make the dishwasher squeaky clean for you going forward. Some dishwashers may have instructions on how to do a cleaning cycle too, so you can consult that as well.

Your microwave and fridge are some other major culprits for grime and germs! Be sure to give the microwave a good, thorough disinfectant cleaning. For the fridge, remove as many of the shelves as you can and let them soak in the bathtub (if possible). Giving them a wipe down using a vinegar-water solution (equal parts each in a spray bottle, more vinegar if it’s a dirtier surface) is a great way to disinfect, without any worry about being safe for your food.

5) Scrub that floor

Floors are often one of the dirtiest areas in an apartment, mainly because they’re heavily trafficked by feet, food, and other things that end up down there. If you have laminate or hardwood floors, getting a steam mop will help achieve a great, deep clean for those surfaces. Just be sure to use products that work with the finish of your floor. For carpets, a good steam cleaner should bring any carpet back to a good state.

While not necessary for your weekly chore list and cleaning tasks, doing a deep, thorough clean every now and then is important to maintaining a well kept home. It’s best to make sure you’re doing that arduous task as efficiently and effectively as possible when you get down to it. For more information on how to give your apartment a great clean, visit the Medallion Blog.