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5 Tips On Keeping Your House Clean With Kids

5 Tips on keeping your house clean with kids

Most parents sit down after a long day and remember how easy it was keeping your house clean before you had those precious little pains in the backside. However much you love your kids, cleaning up after them really is a chore in itself!

Child Playing

There are a few quick little tips that you can teach your kids to do that will really cut down the workload of picking up all of their toys yourself. Now I’ve got your attention! Here goes:

Make a daily chore checklist

This is one for you all to take away and implement straight away. You may not think so, but children like structure just as much as us adults do and implementing a daily chore checklist can really help.

Implementing a daily store checklist needs to have quick and easy jobs at the start and then more jobs can be added once your child gets older and used to the current chores.

For example:

Chores for young kids:

  • Put toys back in the toybox
  • Place dirty clothes in the washing basket
  • Get shoes on the shoe rack

Chores for older kids:

  • Make bed
  • Set the table for dinner
  • Get lunchbox and homework out of school bag

These small chores will make your lives that little bit easier and give you more time for a snuggle with your little one, and of course, that bit of time to yourself when the kids have been put to bed.

Reward your kids

One of the best ways for your children to get used the idea of doing their daily chores is to implement some kind of reward scheme.

For example:

Rewards for young kids:

  • A sticker chart with stars or smiley faces
  • Make them promises to take them to the park (always keep those promises)

Rewards for older kids:

  • Give them 15 minutes of time on their technology
  • Play with them in the garden for half an hour

The best reward for the older kids in the world we live in today is to change the password for the Wi-Fi every day, once their chores have been completed, give them the password to have a small amount of time on the internet.

Make cleaning fun

Yes, cleaning can be fun! Here are a quick few ways of making cleaning fun for your children:

For the younger children:

  • Put on a song like the Tidy Up Rhumba which your kids really will love and dance along to while cleaning!
  • If you have more than one child, let them compete to see who can tidy up first!
  • Let them organise their toys by colour or type

For the older children:

  • Put on their favourite songs, like a Little Mix track or something along those lines. (The Tidy Up Rhumba does work on older kids sometimes as well)!
  • Let the older ones compete as well, it may be a bit more competitive, but it will eventually get done!

Don’t let chores be a punishment

If you tell your child to do a chore as a punishment, this will turn a chore into a negative and not a positive. Instead of making them do a chore, put them on the naughty step and then encourage them to do their chores after you have let them play for a bit and take their mind off being naughty.

Make it a habit

Make sure your children get used to doing your selected chores every single day to ensure they stick in their minds. They will eventually do this on their own, without you having to tell them and also not expect a reward every time as well.

 

After all of this you don’t have time to keep the other parts of your house clean, then give your local Merry Maids a call. Find your local Merry Maids here.

If you have a quick 2 minutes – One of our franchises, Kingston Merry Maids has just celebrated receiving an award for their staff, read the full story here.

Interesting and Yucky Facts About Cleaning Your House

Interesting and Yucky Facts About Cleaning Your House

Your house is your pride and joy, and you want to keep it looking spick and span all the time. We have listed below some interesting and yucky facts about cleaning your house.

Interesting & Yucky Cleaning

Interesting Facts

Here are 5 interesting facts you can take away and help keep your home clean!

Burn those calories: You can burn up to 100 calories an hour while cleaning your house! Who needs a treadmill at the gym when you can lose weight by cleaning! If you have a large house then you can do the hoovering and lose 100’s upon 100’s of calories!

Lemony Clean It: When life gives you lemons, start cleaning! Lemons have anti-bacterial properties and can help disinfect your home. All you need is half a lemon and a damp bit of kitchen roll. Firstly, rub the half of the lemon on the area you want to clean, wait 30 seconds, and then wipe the damp kitchen roll over the same area to get rid of the stickiness. Then just like magic, your side is clean and lemony fresh!

Blend away the germs: Did you know that your blender can clean itself? All you need to do to get rid of the protein shakes or fruit smoothie that is left over is put some hot water with a dash of soap in your blender and turn it on! Hey, presto! A clean blender!

The news can clean: I bet you didn’t know that the news can help you clean! Well, a newspaper can do just that on mirrors and other glass surfaces. Just spray it with antibacterial spray and get rubbing with the newspaper. Make sure you read the paper first though!

Nothing is permanent: Have your kids been writing on the walls and on the table with permanent marker? Well don’t panic, toothpaste can save the day! Toothpaste is a fine abrasive that will remove pretty much anything it touches!

Yucky Facts

Now for some yucky facts that will make you want to get home and clean straight away!

Dirty dust: Dust is a pretty horrible thing! It contains 70-80% of dead skin flakes that have come from you and your family. The other 20-30% is usually from outside substances that have been draped in by footwear or on your clothing. Yucky!

Type away the dirt: You can’t literally type away the dirt, you actually have to clean your computer keyboards, unfortunately. Computer and laptop keyboards are actually dirtier than a toilet seat! Get cleaning yours now, because I bet you never have! Yucky!

Clean that sponge: Your washing up sponge on average contains 10 million bacteria! Yucky! Make sure you regularly clean your sponge by washing it with your washing up liquid and hot soapy water after every washing up session. There are other ways to clean your sponge, we can touch on that on another post for you.

A mattress of mites: On average a mattress contains a whopping 6 billion dust mites! Yucky! Give your mattress a hoover at least once a week or get our friends ServiceMaster Clean in to give it a good clean.

Flush away the germs: Make sure you have the toilet seat down when your flushing the toilet because germs will fly everywhere, maybe even on your soap or toothbrush! Yucky!

Hire a cleaner

Although you can do a bit of cleaning yourselves, the majority of you will not have time to do a good long clean and keep your house germ free. That is where Merry Maids come in. We are a professional and friendly domestic cleaning service that will clean your house until it is glistening, every time.

To find your local Merry Maids business click here.