Major milestones like moving into a new house can be exciting at first. But if you don’t maintain your new home properly, you might find your fresh start turn sour quickly. This is especially true for your brand-new kitchen—which can collect dust, grime, and food particles pretty easily.
Even though cleaning the kitchen can be highly tedious, keeping it spotless has benefits beyond aesthetics. After all, a clean kitchen is a safer kitchen, offering bacteria and other contaminants fewer chances to get to your food. To help you keep your new kitchen looking fresh for a longer time, here are just 5 cleaning tips to help you out.
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Use a Planned System
Effectively keeping your kitchen clean goes beyond making sure you follow a set pattern like wiping surfaces left to right and then top to bottom. Because of all the different things that tend to happen in the kitchen, it’s best to have a schedule when it comes to cleaning it. One way to do this is to make sure you do certain chores on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly periods.
For example, each day should be for wiping exposed surfaces, washing dishes, and sweeping the floor. Meanwhile, each week should include at least one instance of tasks like mopping the kitchen floor, cleaning rarely-used glasses, or polishing stained dishes and silverware. Beyond that, each new month should be for ensuring that the cabinets, drawers, and even refrigerators are cleaned out. This is to remove expired goods and random items that you might not actually need. Maintaining a simple schedule similar to this is indeed a great first step to keeping any kitchen clean for both the short and long term.
Clean Under the Appliances
After a while, it just won’t be enough to simply sweep and mop your kitchen’s floor. Indeed, you’ll sooner or later need to pull out your appliances and thoroughly clean underneath each of them. For this job, it’s best to use water with either soap or baking soda to dislodge debris that have stuck to the floor and hardened. Dip your mop into a bucket of this solution and wipe it around the affected areas.
If you really want to make quick of this chore, then we might have a suggestion for you. Industrial-grade microfiber-topped mops tend to absorb liquids and spills more efficiently, are machine-washable and reusable–all in addition to catching the most resilient pieces of dirt. This is precisely why some big businesses and even some food chains buy only the best commercial mops from the most trusted wholesale sources. Try to get your hands on one if possible and find yourself saving a lot of time.
Make Your Sink Shine
The sink is a central part of the kitchen. It’s not just where you wash your dishes, it’s also in close proximity to various steps in the preparation of food. Combined together, these factors might quickly start wearing the surface, increase the likelihood of gunk build-up, and ruin your sink altogether. This is why you should regularly keep it clean and shiny.
One way of maintaining your sink is to start by cleaning it with any alcohol, which could include spirits like gin or vodka. And once you’ve got the dirt off, wipe down every square inch with an oil-based formula. You can use olive oil, baby oil, or even wood cleaner. Doing this often won’t just keep your sinking looking like it’s brand new. As a bonus, it also adds an invisible protective layer of oil to prevent food stains from sticking to your sink—keeping it clean for longer.
Know Some Smart Hacks
Sometimes, some methods of cleaning can sound quite strange but still be as effective. Just one of these life hacks you can try is using brewed tea to make your stove easier to clean. The trick is to heat up a pot of tea at 4 or so times the normal strength. Then wipe the tea all over your stove. It might seem weird at first and even a waste of good tea, but the tannins in the tea actually serve a very smart purpose. Their chemical build up is great for stopping grease and grime from sticking unto the stove–making them easier to wipe away.
And if you commonly use baking soda to deodorize your refrigerator, you might want to know this next nifty tip. Once the baking soda has spent its ideal 30-day stint in your fridge, you can still put it to good use. Instead of throwing it away completely, just dump it down your garbage disposal system with some water. It’ll stay effective long enough to keep your garbage disposal fresh as well.
Freshen Up Your Kitchen
Cooking some types of food can release specific odors that might not be appetizing or even pleasant. What’s more, it might spread throughout the other parts of the house and stick around longer than you expect it to. This is why you might want to stop it from happening by giving your kitchen a counteracting fresh scent.
But if you think that keeping a running stock of air fresheners is too expensive, you’ll be happy to know that there are some smart alternatives. As an example, you can use a real lemon for a 100% natural lemony fresh scent. You can skewer it, leave it in 300-degree heat inside your oven for 15 minutes, then leave the open door open to let the aroma reach every corner of the kitchen. Alternatively, you can cut it into slices and boil it for around the same amount of time to get the same effect.
Your kitchen might not be the place where people usually stay, but you can’t deny the value in keeping it clean. And this is true whether your house is old or new. Because of all the things that we end up doing in the kitchen, leaving it dirty can likely be unsafe for you and your family. So always keep the above tips in mind and make sure your kitchen is always in top shape.
References:
https://www.maids.com/cleaning-hacks/clean-new-home/
https://www.mollymaid.com/cleaning-institute/kitchens.aspx
