When it comes to the holidays, sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring how out to keep your house clean. I’ve got you covered with a few of my favorite tips that can help take out some of the stress from the season.
Over the holidays, we have more guests than we do other times of year, and I know we aren’t alone. Whether it’s hosting cookie exchanges, having holiday parties, or enjoying time with family for a big Christmas Eve dinner, I plan more events from Thanksgiving to New Years than the rest of the year combined.
When those guests come over, it’s important to me that I figure out how to clean my house fast. Between the kids and the cat, there’s always something to clean.
But I manage it. My house may not be magazine cover ready, but I’m happy to have people over. And I don’t spend hours a day; in fact, I have a little secret.
But there are a lot of tips I can share to help figure out how to keep your house clean. And it doesn’t involve a mad dash throwing everything into a closet two minutes before the doorbell rings.
How to Keep Your House Clean for the Holidays
Enlist everyone to help
Growing up, it was my mom who cleaned. She was in charge of it all, but I don’t have the time, energy, or patience for that. Do you?
Instead, this needs to be a whole family effort. Regardless of age, everyone can do something.
When my kids were tiny, we played the clean up game with the requisite song as they were in charge of putting their toys away – as well as loading and unloading the dishwasher and a few other age-appropriate chores.
Now, they help with everything from dusting to cleaning toilets. And they enjoy cleaning them if only because they do the vinegar and baking soda experiment every time that makes it fun.
But more importantly, everyone in the house is enlisted to not make things worse. How often do kids come home and dump backpacks in the middle of the floor? Dishes don’t make it to the dishwasher?
Nope. I call a halt to all that, and it makes it easier on everyone. It takes less effort to bring a cup from the dining room table and put it into the dishwasher than to put it on the side of the sink and come back later to put it in the dishwasher.
Minimize the effort, as we’re all short on time. And maybe patience.
Spend just 10 minutes
For me as well as for my kids, it’s overwhelming to say that we’re going to spend Saturday afternoon cleaning the house. The project is too big, and it either doesn’t happen (well) or they grumble.
Instead, we clean in ten minute bursts. Everyone takes ten minutes with an assigned task, whether that’s dusting the flat surfaces, putting away the clean hand washed dishes or spraying down the kitchen counters, there’s so much we can get done in ten minutes.
And it doesn’t feel so overwhelming.
Sometimes we get into it and could go for longer, but I keep my word with my kids. That way they know when I say ten minutes next time, I mean it and they work hard for those ten minutes because they know it doesn’t secretly mean 50 minutes.
We do this multiple times a week, and I’ll do it multiple times a day just to break it up.
Clean up as you go
The clean as you go theory is something my kids struggle with, but it helps me so much. My daughter will make homemade cookie dough and leave everything out until she’s done.
Shocker: when she’s done, she’s DONE and really doesn’t want to put everything away. Often she “forgets” things, too.
Instead, put things away as you use them. I always take out all my ingredients before I start cooking or baking so I don’t forget something, but I put each one away as I go.
Not only is it a great checklist to make sure everything made it into my recipe, but it feels like less work even though obviously it’s the same amount.
I made the mistake of not having my son open his college mail as it arrived, and he had a stack that way – no joke – over two feet high. And then it’s just too overwhelming to deal with.
We tossed it all, but we also implemented a new strategy to open the mail and deal with it as it came in. It’s easier on everyone to deal with things right away and the fact that it feels like less work is just a bonus.
Invest in a quality robot vacuum
I’ve owned a robot vacuum for almost as long as I’ve had children. I’ve had four robot vacuums along the way, all different brands, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses.
The intelligent robot vacuum takes so much time and energy off your plate because it does the work for you. I have mine run every single day, in part because we have a cat in addition to very active kids.
I also have it run a spot clean (one of my favorite features) after I bake when I accidentally spill flour or rice or – like last night – my son drops his grilled cheese sandwich on the floor and leaves crumbs everywhere.
The spot clean feature means that I can keep going with my cooking or baking without having to stress about cleaning up a (dry) mess immediately which may mean something burns or add another task to my list when I finish with my dish.
This is where the new vaccums come in super handy, as they all have apps where you can run them from your phone via Bluetooth. I love this shortcut to simplify setup, as well as improve creating virtual zones, no-go-zones, scheduling cleaning routines, on-robot notifications, and managing multiple floor plans.
Vacuums today have longer run times that can clean the entire floor before running out of juice, and they have more intelligent patterns to cover the entire floor rather than running willy-nilly. Plus, they have larger dustbins, so you don’t have to empty them as often.
I. Love. That. Feature.
And remember the cat I mentioned? Pharaoh has his food and water bowls, and I don’t want my vacuum to run into them and mess things up. I don’t need to use physical barriers to keep the vacuum out of the space or anything like that anymore. Instead, I draw a virtual zone in the app, and the vacuum avoids that area.
Best of all, there’s nothing physical I need to pick up before guests arrive.
Make sure you get a vacuum with a high performance HEPA filter that traps as many allergens as possible and dust particles as small as 0.3 microns. With guests coming over for the holidays, the last thing I want is guests who sneeze because of allergens in the air.
I may not be able to afford a weekly cleaning lady, but I almost like having a robot vacuum that cleans for me daily better. It’s definitely motivation to pick up the little things I need that so easily become clutter to ensure the vacuum runs with no surprises.
Have a secret place for those last minute items
Yes, I said my tips on how to keep your house clean for the holidays didn’t mean throwing everything into a closet. And I mean that, as you can see from the tips above.
However, there are some things that we use regularly and want access to that guests don’t need to see. The television remotes, my favorite tortilla blanket I like to snuggle with all winter long, the book I’m currently reading, and those types of thing don’t really have a home.
But have you seen those ottomans that are storage units, too? Or my coffee table that has drawers where my lotion and nail polish and stamps and more can live with no one the wiser?
You don’t need – or want – something huge because then it just becomes a repository for junk. That said, a piece of furniture that fits your style and provides hidden storage is a smart buy and can help with those last few things as you work to keep your house clean over the holidays.
Bonus: Don’t waste time on tasks no one will see
You’ve probably heard the joke about husbands who start deep-cleaning the garage when company is just hours from arrival. Don’t do that, and don’t let anyone in your house do that.
Figure out the important tasks for now, and focus on the other challenges later. This is not the time to figure out how to clean a washing machine for the first time, for example.
That doesn’t mean you never want to do them, of course. Know the time and place because it is important to clean the storage area in your basement and to do that deep clean of your garage – just not right before guests arrive.
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