From the article “Cleaning Children’s Rooms“:

Make a cleaning map for a child’s room, showing where everything is to be stored. Include items such as compact discs, shoes, books, stuffed animals and dirty laundry. Not only is this fun and educational, but the child also has no excuse about not knowing where to put away items.

How do you inspire your children to do chores? Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments.

(Thanks to Parenthacks for the link.)

Cleaning the closet floors is not necessarily a fun project, so I only do it once or twice a year (most of my house guests aren’t inspecting the floors of my closets, thankfully). But, it helps to keep dust mites under control and reduce allergens.

If you’re looking for a weekend project that usually takes less than an hour, join me in cleaning your closet floors. They are definitely a forgotten space and can use some attention if it has been a while since you last attended to them. Happy sweeping!

These cards are actual playing cards, (so you can play poker with them even after your kids leave the nest) but they have the added bonus of being a fun way to create chore lists for kids. From the manufacturer’s website:

Now children can either play games for chores, parents can set out which chores need to be completed or have the entire family pick a card each for their daily chore.

What a great way to have fun with the entire family

Build confidence, responsibility and organization

You could easily create something similar in a DIY project with cardstock and your computer’s printer, specifically customized for your home’s needs. Mostly, I like the idea of making chores for children fun.

The “6 Items You Touch Everyday That Are Filthier Than a Toilet” article isn’t safe for work and contains some non-child-friendly language, so if you want to see the original, you’ll need to go to Cracked.com and do a search yourself (we try to be at least a wee-bit family friendly here on Unclutterer). But, the research linked to from the article is super safe (albeit disturbing), so I’ll put a few of those links into this post describing the findings from the Cracked.com article.

Coming in at #6 is the soap in public restroom dispensers. If the liquid soap isn’t in a sealed and disposable bag, it likely has bacteria in it. The door knob is also pretty bad. And, the faucet knobs aren’t all that clean, either. Turns out, the toilet seat has less bacteria on it that these three other items.

Taking the #5 spot is paper money. The Cracked.com article says there is a “sponge-like ability for money to absorb whatever it comes in contact with.” Ew.

The #4 award went to dirty laundry and washing machines. They contain a lot of bacteria, including enough E. Coli to make you sick.

Number 3 is the one we’ve all heard about — your computer’s keyboard. A regular cleaning with anti-bacterial wipes will help to keep this under control.

Similarly, the #2 dirtiest object is your cell phone. According to Cracked.com: “weighing in at a whopping 25,127 germs per square inch. Yeah, about 10 times as bad as your keyboard.”

And, the winner of the dirtiest place you encounter on a daily basis is your mouth. It seems impossible, but experts report that we have more than 700 different species of bacteria in our mouths.

Pardon me, I’m going to go and brush my teeth again.

Did any of these items surprise you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Made from heavy-duty fabric, the apron will keep your clothing free from splatters, while the attached towel is the ideal place to wipe your hands during the process. When you’re all done cooking, simply unzip the towel and use it to clean up. Complete with multipurpose pockets.

The zippered dishtowel could easily be added to the bottom of any apron as a simple DIY project. However, at $25, it’s not a bad price for an apron. Either way, I like that this design was made with an actual cook in mind.

A good cleaning once a year isn’t a bad idea for your keyboard, either, and her instructions will get you back to new. Keep the clutter out from under your fingertips.

If you are looking to clean anything in your home, check out this site for solid directions. The comments are extremely helpful, too. Something I’m going to do this coming weekend is take Casey’s advice:

Apply Rain – X (typically used for vehicle windows) to your shower doors and you won’t have the water spots/scum/build-up from your water. The water will just run off of the glass like it does in your vehicle. I’ve also applied a coat of car wax to my shower walls (not the floor) and it has the same effect. The water just beads up and runs off. Saves A LOT of time in cleaning and elbow grease.

My shower stall is the hardest place to clean in the house. I really hope the Rain-X helps. Check out How To Clean Stuff for more great articles and tips.

(via Lifehacker)

How do I handle dust in my apartment? I dust everything and 2 days later it’s back to the same level. Is there some magical something or other out there to help me control the dust? I live in the city on a 2nd story apartment. No one above and only carport below. Help!

There are some really terrific answers to the question in the remainder of the comments. If you struggle with dust, I definitely recommend checking out the conversation.

The piece of advice I most agree with is getting rid of carpets. I don’t know what it is about carpets, but they really seem to increase the amount of dust in a place.

Also, check out my article “Dusting in the 21st Century” on RealSimple.com for even more dusting tips.

(pictured is an electrostatic duster)

Creating an organized life means, among other things, taking control of your space. When did you last clean your toilets? How about your sinks? Mirrors? Floors? Whether you own or rent, live in a studio apartment or a large home, cleaning is a regular necessity. I’m willing to bet that with few exceptions you probably don’t look forward to cleaning? Yet, like it or not, housecleaning — like organizing — remains a lifelong maintenance task. In the spirit of enjoying your life as much as possible, how do you reconcile the fact that you have to do something you dislike over and over again for all of the foreseeable future? (Man, that sounds grim) The way I see it, you have only a few options…

1. You can hire someone else to do it for you. This is a viable option for some people, but others either can’t justify the expense, or just plain can’t stomach the thought of paying someone to do something they can do for themselves.
2. You can do it yourself and grumble and whine and dread every minute of it.
3. You can do it yourself and enjoy it.

The first option is relatively easy. Ask for referrals from friends to find someone to clean for you who is reliable and trustworthy. The second option is the one a lot of people choose. They do clean their own homes, but only when it’s so bad they can’t stand it or when they’re expecting company. They dread thinking about it and dread doing it even more. Then when they do clean, they spend every minute wishing they were finished.

I’m all about option number three, and I want you to be too! So how do you take a task you hate and turn it around so you not only don’t dread it, but you actually begin to enjoy it? The secret is all in your mindset.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, living an organized life has a lot to do with taking control of your space. This means making sure the areas where you live and work are in a “positive state of readiness,” so they can support your life both mentally and physically. Cleanliness is part of that positive state of readiness, and here’s the secret to enjoying cleaning:

Look past the task and connect with the benefit it offers to your life.

Although housekeeping (and organizing) may seem like drudgery on the surface, if you can mentally and emotionally connect with the deeper benefit, the task becomes easier and feels more worthwhile in exchange for a larger future benefit. So, keeping your house clean and orderly is just like going to the gym, going to college, or anything with a long term benefit. You do what you must now in order to feel a certain way and have a specific result later.

Think of housekeeping as another expression of love for yourself and your family, rather than a necessary evil, and you’ll dread it less and enjoy it more.

The coasters can live under items like soy sauce, steak sauce, and honey. The flat cardboard surfaces have just the right absorbency to prevent messy, hard-to-clean-up spills.

What alternative uses have you found for beer coasters?

Additionally, have a safe and happy St. Patrick’s Day from all of us at Unclutterer.

Not only are these self-cleaning toilets perfect for public spaces, but I would love to have one in my home. Time saving, “clutter” clearing, and sanitary. It’s the Litter-Robot for humans.

I live in an apartment without a washer or dryer in my unit. Unclutterer is rich with laundry advice, but none of it gives specific tips for regular laundromat users. How can I make the process suck less?

In a strange set of circumstances, the next day I received an e-mail from reader Hannah that directly answered Diane’s question. Spooky.

The tips that you guys have given about laundry routines tend to be oriented (understandably) toward home-owners who have whole rooms for their laundry-related paraphernalia. As an apartment-dweller (with roommates), I just wanted to pass along a system that’s been working well for me in terms of the four laundry factors specific to apartment buildings:

• general lack of space
• lack of privacy (not being able to leave stuff in the laundry room between washings)
• having to tramp up and down stairs (often ice-covered), lugging hampers or bags of laundry
• having to hunt up quarters

The magic thing that has changed my life and enabled me to stop procrastinating about doing my laundry: a “laundry tote!” I’m using a shower caddy (this one happens to be a soft-sided waterproof vinyl bag with pockets, but those square plastic ones would work as well) to hold:

• various detergents decanted into Gatorade bottles (which hold enough for multiple loads but aren’t as big and heavy)
• stain remover
• dryer sheets
• quarters
• delicates bags

This way, when I finally get the gumption up to traipse down the stairs with a giant hamper in 2-degree weather, I don’t get bogged down searching for coins and juggling bottles and dryer sheets and my keys. And when I’ve got quarters hanging around, I know where to stash them.

I also use a couple of the pockets to hold the extra buttons that come with clothes, patches, elastic, etc.

And, to chime in at the end here, be sure to check out our post “How to use the laundromat to get our laundry routine under control” for a few more ideas.

Thank you, Diane and Hannah, for being a part of our Ask Unclutterer column. A solid question and an informative answer!

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

At 10:00 EST this morning, I closed the comments and counted up the entries. Then, I headed over to the Random Integer Generator at random.org and entered in the data:

Out popped the following numbers:

#31 — Ruth M
#186 — Naomi
#406 — Cindy Marsch
#805 — Heidi

And then I realized we had FIVE winners, not four … so back I went to the random number generator, and out popped:

#48 — Brittany

I have contacted the winners and will be sending them their prizes this coming week. Congratulations to our winners and thank you to Clorox and everyone for participating!

If you weren’t a winner, and still want to try the product, you should be able to find Clorox Disinfecting Wipes at your local grocery store.

Since I’m already a user of their product, I asked if instead of sending me a sample to try we could do a giveaway for our readership. Clorox was game, and now I have coupons for five of our readers to win four canisters each of Clorox Disinfecting Wipes (and they’re the new “décor” canisters, too).

To enter for a chance to win four free canisters of disinfecting wipes, simply leave ONE comment to this post indicating that you want to participate in the drawing. On Thursday, March 5, 2009, at 10:00 a.m. EST, I will enter the number of comments into the Random Integer Generator at random.org and select five random winners. Good luck!

Warning: If you leave a comment to this post that isn’t an entry, I will DELETE it. Nothing personal, I just don’t want to select a winner for the wipes who isn’t interested in participating in the giveaway.

Regardless of Phil’s predictions, today is a good day because it is the halfway point between the shortest day of the year and the spring equinox. This means that it doesn’t really matter what Phil saw, we’re now closer to the end of this winter than the start of it.

Before most people realize that spring is on the horizon, now is a great time to get ahead of the curve and start making appointments for all of your spring cleaning activities. These appointments are usually best to be made for late May or early June:

• Contact the company that services your furnace and set up an appointment to have your furnace professionally inspected.
• Contact the chimney sweep and make an appointment to have your chimney cleaned, your flue inspected, and your vents tested.
• Make an appointment to have your lawn mower serviced and your blades sharpened.
• Schedule to run a test with your home security system provider.
• Inspect your wood floors for damages or scratches and contact someone to wax or refinish your floors if necessary.
• If you use a lawn service, call now to make sure you’re on the summer schedule.

Obviously, you don’t have to take on all of these tasks if you don’t want to. But, if you’re someone who sticks to a tight spring cleaning regimen, now is the time to set your appointments.

Happy Groundhog Day!

Image from the (very tongue-in-cheek) official Groundhog Day website.

1. How many clothes can a washing machine hold in a single wash?

First off, know that there are not standard load sizes for washing machines. Phrases like “mid-size capacity” or “ultra capacity” mean different things from manufacturer to manufacturer. The number you need to determine how many clothes a washing machine can effectively handle at a time is its pounds of clothing per load.

For example, Whirlpool states that their top-loading washing machines can handle 12 to 18 pounds based on model. And, their front-loading machines vary from 12 to 20 pounds based on model. But, Whirlpool doesn’t provide in their product descriptions anything other than drum sizes of models in cubic feet. A machine’s drum size is irrelevant because it has no bearing on the motor’s ability to handle the weight of the clothing in the drum. To find out the weight your washing machine can handle, you may have to do what I did and call the store where the washing machine was purchased. I learned that my “large capacity” washer can hold just 12 pounds of clothing.

To learn how much 12 pounds of clothing is (or whatever your washer can handle), stand on a scale empty handed and weigh yourself. Then, have someone pile into your arms pairs of jeans. When the number on the scale increases 12 pounds over your empty-handed weight, you’ll have an idea of your washing machine’s capacity. For me, this came out to be between 9 and 10 pairs of jeans. Try the same thing with other clothing items to get a full picture of what your machine can handle.

2. How many clothes does an average person wear in a seven day period?

Obviously, this number varies based on the person. However, I was curious about how much clothing I dirty in a week. So, I abandoned my normal twice-weekly washing routine and weighed all of my dirty clothes at the end of the week. Turns out, I wore 16 pounds of clothing last week. My husband’s clothing came in at 17.5 pounds. Honestly, I was blown away that we dirty so much clothing in a single week. But, since we both started working out every day in 2009, we now dirty at least two sets of clothes a day. Between the two of us, we had three loads of clothing in a week (well, actually four because I had a delicates load).

3. How many towels and sheets does an average person go through in a seven day period?

Again, this number will vary based on personal preference. In our house, my husband and I combined go through 1 set of queen sheets, six washcloths, two kitchen towels, four bath towels, and two hand towels per week. This turns out to be less than 12 pounds, but unfortunately all of it won’t physically fit in a single load in our washing machine. So, the sheets get their own load and the towels get another. If you’re keeping track, this means that our family of two generates five or six loads of laundry most weeks.

4. What is your best guess for how many loads a family of four would generate in a week?

Kids seem to generate a lot of clothing — spills, sports practices, uniforms for after-school jobs, indecision about what to wear, etc. If I generate 16 pounds of clothing in a week, I imagine that a middle schooler or high schooler could easily create 14 to 15 pounds of clothing in a week. Multiply that by two and add in two adults, and a family of four probably generates between 60 and 65 pounds of clothing per week. In our washing machine, that would be five to six loads of clothing.

Then, figure in a load for all of the bedding for a week (three sets of sheets can probably fit in one load), and two loads for towels (12 washcloths, two kitchen towels, eight bath towels, and four hand towels), and a typical family of four probably generates between 8 and 10 loads of laundry per week.

5. How long does it take to do the laundry?

Again, this varies based on the machine you have and what you’re laundering. But … in our home, a full cycle in the washing machine is 35 minutes and most everything is dry in 55 minutes. A single load from start to finish in the machines takes 1.5 hours and then another 15-20 minutes to fold and put away. It can be a two-hour chore for a single load of laundry.

Eight loads of laundry would take roughly 10 hours to complete. (That is estimating 35 minutes to wash the first load without anything in the dryer, 440 minutes to dry 8 loads of laundry, and 120 minutes of folding and putting away time.) Ten loads of laundry would take just over 12 hours to complete.

6. What is a reasonable laundry routine for a family of four?

Reasonable is a pretty vague term in this instance, so feel welcome to offer up alternatives in the comments section.

Monday: Launder all the sheets from all three beds. (1 load)
Tuesday: Launder child #1 and child #2’s clothing. (1-2 loads)
Wednesday: Launder adult’s clothing. (1-2 loads)
Thursday: Launder towels. (2 loads)
Friday: Launder child #1 and child #2’s clothing. (1-2 loads)
Saturday: Launder adult’s clothing. (1-2 loads)
Sunday: Rest, or launder a load of delicates.

7. What are some additional tips and tricks?

Check out my previous posts on getting laundry under control for additional suggestions for tackling this beast.

• 2008 new year’s resolution wrap up
• Reader question: Ending laundry chaos
• More than 15 ways to handle recurrent clutter
• My 2008 new year’s resolution: Laundry

I mentioned my revelation to my wife after we completed our quick clean up and she mentioned how much she used to hate cleaning our prior home. (Our previous home was roughly one third larger than our current one.)

Since we downsized back in April of 2008, we have discovered the following things:

Energy costs: We have saved about 50 percent on home energy costs per month since the move. (Our old home was not well insulated, so the size wasn’t the only culprit to the high energy costs.)

Mortgage: While smaller doesn’t always mean cheaper, in our case we cut our mortgage payment by 30 percent and we also save 75 percent on our homeowner’s insurance. Our prior home was older and larger, while our current home is smaller and recently updated. 

Maintenance: As I mentioned above, the cleaning time for our home has been decreased significantly. 

While the positives are great, I do have a couple things that I miss about our old home: more room for entertaining and a nice master bathroom. Those two luxuries are worth being sacrificed, however, for all of the other benefits found in our current home. We have less clutter, fewer possessions in general, genuinely like this place more, and we’re saving a lot of money.

I did a relatively decent job staying on top of my laundry situation until our dryer died and I had to declare laundry bankruptcy in May. Since the dryer situation was fixed, I have to admit that things have gone pretty well in the laundry realm.

From time to time, laundry will get folded and live on the couch for a day before making it into the dresser. However, washed, dried, and folded laundry is leaps and bounds ahead of the huge piles that used to form in the dirty clothes hamper.

The best change I made to keep laundry under control in our home was to decrease the size of our hampers. I got rid of the large hampers and replaced them with single load size hampers. When the hampers are filled, I know I have one load of laundry to wash. Psychologically, I know I can easily take on one load and so I do it without any procrastination. Most weeks, I do a load of laundry every Monday, and two loads on Thursday (I change the sheets on the bed and wash the bath towels as an extra load on Thursday). That’s it. Laundry no longer is a major stress in my life — a wonderful improvement from this point last year.

I’ve started to think about what organizing goal I’m going to add to my 2009 new year’s resolutions. As I did last year, I’ll announce my decision in January and my plan to achieve that goal.

What organizing resolutions are you considering for 2009? How did you fare with your organizing resolutions for 2008? I’m interested in reading what goals you plan to set in the comments!

She takes part in the nightly ritual of picking up all her toys that are left on the floor in the den before she goes to bed. The task only takes a couple of minutes and it leaves the room less cluttered than it was. She has become quite adept at this task and sometimes she even initiates it.

In an article in the Washington Post, the issue of teaching a young child the importance of pitching in around the home is examined. From the article:

Now that my daughter, at 20 months, is old enough to do things such as put her shirt in a hamper and wipe a spill — or at least some portion of it — I realize that this is my opportunity to strike. The second her masticated Cheerios hit the floor is a teachable moment, a chance to explain that half-chewed food lives in the trash and not under our feet. By showing her how to clean up after herself, child development experts tell me, I am instilling a sense of accomplishment and helping her master the subtle variation in skill required to scoop up squished cereal as opposed to squished peas.

The article covers different aspects of household chores and looks at the amount of time that we spend on chores in general. According to research, the amount of time that we spend on chores has decreased significantly over the last 20 years. The decrease in household chores is due to both parents working, children taking part in more activities, and outsourcing to cleaning services.

If household chores have decreased on average, then there are still many things that your child should learn to help out with around the home. A cleaning service isn’t in your home 24/7, so picking up after themselves is at the top of the list. The younger they are, the easier it is to instill this basic task into their routine.

I own a white MacBook, so I decided to try my hand at cleaning my laptop in an effort to help our readers. After making a few calls and asking for advice from my friends, I repeatedly heard that the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser was the cleaning tool for me to try.

Here is a picture of my laptop before I tried cleaning it. You’ll see that there are dark spots where my wrists rest while I type:

I then scrubbed the affected areas with the Magic Eraser:

And, it was successful at taking off a good portion of the dirt and grime:

However, I’m not going to say that it was a gleaming success. The side-by-side comparison shows that although it did get rid of a good portion of the yuck on the wrist rest, it wasn’t a perfect solution:

What have other people done to get dirt and grime off of white laptops and keyboards? I thought the Magic Eraser did an adequate job, but I’m hoping there is an even better product out there to help clean up the rest of the dirt. Let us know what you have found to clean laptops and keyboards in the comments.