Five Simple Ways to Keep your Kitchen Clean
The kitchen is the heart of the home in our house. It's the place we gather around as a family daily and share about our day. Whenever we have family and friends over, you'll always find us gathered around our kitchen island, enjoying good food and company. Needless to say, this little area of our home gets quite a bit of traffic and can get dirty fast if you don't keep up with it.
I'm the type of person that enjoys cleaning, but I also don't want to spend every weekend deep cleaning the kitchen. Who does?! So my trick to keeping my kitchen clean is by doing certain small tasks every day and night so that kitchen can stay clean. Leaving me with free time to enjoy the more important things in life, like cuddling up to watch the latest Netflix show with my favorite people.
For this post, I've gathered up some of my best tips and tricks on what I do to keep my kitchen clean every day so that those deep cleaning sessions are few and far between.
DIRTY DISHES GO IN THE DISHWASHER IMMEDIATELY
If you walk away with anything from this post, let it be this: put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher immediately after use. Make it a rule for everyone in your family to follow. There's nothing better than walking into a kitchen and not seeing dishes piled up in the sink. The fact is that you'll always have dirty dishes but if you handle them immediately, they become a non-issue allowing you to focus your time on another area of your kitchen or home.
If the dishwasher is running, I quickly hand wash the dirty dishes and get them out of the way so that when the dishwasher needs emptied, I don't pile on the work and just focus on one thing at a time. If you have a large family, I would also tell you to turn on your dishwasher every night. This isn't a rule that I follow for our family because we are a small family of two adults, a toddler, and a newborn. I hate the idea of running the dishwasher half empty just for the sake of running it every night. So if you find yourself with a full dishwasher every night, make it a habit to turn on the dishwasher every night before you go to bed so that you wake up with clean dishes in the morning.
CLEAN YOUR SINK
After you've handled the dishes for the night, I give my sink a quick cleaning with a DIY cleaning solution that I keep underneath my sink. 50% water, 50% white vinegar mixed in a spray bottle - spray your sink down with the cleaning solution and let sit for a minute or two. I usually spray my sink down and let it sit while I wipe down the counters really quick. After I'm done with the counters, I scrub the sink in any areas that has any food debris stuck and rinse with warm water. Leaving with a sparkling clean sink with minimal effort!
CLEAN AS YOU COOK
As I prepare meals for my family, I make it a point to clean up as I go. I find that it's the simplest and fastest way to get the kitchen back into shape after a cooking session. I don't like waiting until all the cooking is complete because honestly by then, I'm half tempted to just leave everything there and enjoy the delicious food I just whipped up. When my husband is home from work he also helps out with the cleaning while I cook or vice versa. Getting your partner involved helps a lot and makes cleaning up after a meal very minimal, making it more likely that I'll clean the counters and sink!
WIPE DOWN COUNTERS
As a stay at home, we use our kitchen a lot throughout the day. I would love to be able to tell you that I wipe the kitchen counters down after every meal. If I'm feeling extra motivated and energized, I probably will wipe down the counters, but honestly, my rule of thumb is to give them a good wipe down after dinner. A simple wipe down to make sure all the crumbs throughout the day are picked up and not end up all over our floor is easy enough.
CONTROL CLUTTER
Keeping your kitchen counters free of clutter will instantly make your kitchen appear cleaner. I make it a point to keep only the small appliances we use the most up top, while storing away all others that we use less frequently. Next to our stove, I only keep utensils that we typically use during cooking and serving, while on the other side I keep the items that we use daily when cooking. Of course, I've decorated our counter's with pretty plates to help corral all of these utensils to make the counters look organized and pretty. Read this post if you are interested in learning my tips on how I decorate my kitchen without creating a lot of clutter.
What you won't find on my kitchen counter is mail, papers, or anything that doesn’t belong. I make it a point to sort through the mail immediately as it comes in the house. This helps reduce our paper clutter and keeps our counters clean! If I'm working on a project that requires use of the large kitchen counter space, I make a point to pick up as soon as I've finished. These small efforts will make your kitchen feel clutter free and allow you to keep it clean in a matter of minutes.
Happy Cleaning!
