Care For Your Castle - Eldis' Top Tips For a Hygenic House, Living Room Edition

Hello everyone,

and welcome to the third entry in this series! After having looked at the bedroom and the bathroom, I think it’s time to move on to the place where you probably spend most of your awake-time at home:

your living room!

As ever, this series is meant solely as a starting point. I know many people get overwhelmed when confronted with having to be responsible for cleaning their house, and they don’t know where to start or what exactly has to be done. I’m introducing to you my rhythm and manner of cleaning here, which might not work for you. Use it as a baseline or support as you find your own way to keep your house a pleasant, homely place to stay, and don’t feel bad if you don’t have the physical ability or mental energy to do every single thing mentioned in this article.

Before we get to cleaning though, I do want to kinda get into tidying for a little bit. As I have mentioned before, I don’t mind (I even highly encourage!) you having a lot of stuff. However, all of the stuff should have its place and should stay in that place as often as possible. The place that the stuff belongs in, however, should also make you happy! Look around at the furniture and layout of your living room right now. Does it make you happy? Does it make you comfortable? Is it practical? Or are you low-key (or maybe even high-key!) annoyed by where your couch and table and the sofa are placed? Well, I am here to tell you that you are allowed to change it.

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Your living room more than any other space is one where you should feel welcome and allow other people to feel welcome, one where you should not have too many stresses. ‘But Eldis,’ you might say, ‘I don’t even know how else all this will fit in here!’ Well then, firstly consider if you want to keep everything that’s in there, in there. If you don’t like a piece of furniture and you own it (please don’t throw away any of your landlord’s stuff if you live in a furnished apartment), donate it! Or throw it out, depending on its quality! Or if you indeed live in a furnished apartment, but you’re lucky enough to have some sort of basement or similar storage area, put it there for the time being! And secondly, when you change your interior design it doesn’t have to be perfect in one go. I once spent an entire evening moving my couch to literally every single wall of my living room before I decided where I wanted to put it, and I remember that, when I was a child, I’d sometimes wake up, arrive downstairs and see that the entire living room was rearranged, and then a week later rearranged again. Allow yourself to have fun with it! Do something wild!

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Where to place your couch

As a tip though, but this is 100% my personal taste so you can immediately disregard this and I will not be offended at all, is that you place your couches and sofas with their backs to a wall, rather than in the middle of your living room. It creates more space in the center of your room, so more space to walk. This makes your living room suddenly look much bigger! Think that this means that you and your guests are seated too far away from each other? Nothing is stopping you from moving the sofa you’re sitting in closer to the couch your guests are sitting on during the visit. I’m a big proponent of making your living room more ‘liquid’, more open to change!

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And with regards to all the random stuff you have collected in your life? Display it! Don’t be embarrassed by them, give them fun spots to give your house personality and to make you happy. I’m a grown-ass adult woman with a degree and the ability to vote, and I own one (1) piece of a mammoth’s tooth of dubious authenticity, one (1) world war 2 bullet of non-dubious authenticity, apparently shot by a German, and uncountable (I seriously do not know, but at least 90) mini-tsumstsums of various Disney characters. All quite random, but so much fun! The bullet and the mammoth’s tooth are displayed on a corner rack, my tsums are spread out over various shelves and on top of books (my spider-man tsumtsum is having off of a rather large book with some white string so it looks like he’s hanging from his web) and I made a ladder to hang my large collection of mugs (my eternal weakness) from, to have those on display as well! There are so many fun ways to display your awesome possessions, ways that give your house personality!

While we’re on the topic of couches and sofas anyway, when was the last time you washed those pillows and those pillowcases? Yeah, I thought so. Wash these at least once a year. Vacuum clean in between the seat and the arm/backrests of the couch and sofa once a month or every two months to catch all the crumbs and other dirt. It might help if you put your vacuum cleaner at the lowest strength when you do this. Vacuum the floors once a week and mop once a month, or twice a month if you live in a more muddy area. Don’t forget to vacuum underneath furniture!

Wipe down your dinner table once a day, but the rest of the room you can dust just once a week. It shouldn’t even take that long, just fiveish minutes to quickly go past various surfaces: the tops of your books if you have bookshelves, most doorways will have a little ledge around them which can gather dust, any and all sideables, lamps and just the miscellaneous things you have lying around. Set a five-minute timer for yourself once a week & clean until it goes off. If you’re in the flow when it goes off don’t let me stop you from continuing, but else there’s another chance next week if you haven’t managed to get to everything. Don’t forget to clean your dining room chairs once a week as well, especially the places where you grab them to move yourself and the chair away from or closer to the dining table. And if you have chair leg floor protectors, rub away the dust that gets gathered on those too, or vacuum underneath the legs of your chairs to get that away. Do this about once a month.

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This already brings us to the speed round! Your living room might be one of the biggest rooms in your house (it is for me), but it really is not the most difficult place to clean! I haven’t mentioned my mum’s wisdom yet in this article, so let me share some of it now: ‘I always immediately do everything that has to be done because I am a lazy housewife’. Okay, of course not always everything, but the idea is that it’s easier to keep up with everything rather than in one bulk having to do all the things you’re behind on. So when you see something that’s out of place and no longer in use, put it back, and when you see something that’s dusty, quickly clean it off. It helps to have a cleaning cloth somewhere hidden but within quick reach in your living room, so you can, within 10 seconds, get rid of that bit of dirt that’s annoying you.

Final speed round

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For your own convenience’s sake, it’s easier to have side tables that function for multiple purposes: both table and storage. I have one that doubles as two bookshelves on wheels, for example.

Photo via Pixabay

I mentioned cleaning the top of books, but also clean the shelf behind your books twice a year, a lot of dust tends to gather there.

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Other places that gather dust or become dirty that you might not think of are coathangers, the top of a coat hanger rack, the sides of doors (do you always hold your door exactly at the handle? No, me neither), hidden ledges at random places throughout your house and electrical sockets (clean those carefully, and with a dry cloth!).

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Wipe down your tv every so often as well! And, with the vacuum on its lowest stand, vacuum out the chaos of cords behind the screen.

That is it for this edition! I hope you will join us next time as we clean the kitchen!

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Do you only have the energy to do one single thing mentioned in this article? Choose one day each week where you’ll set a 5-minute timer and clean for just those five minutes.

How to use the cleaning schedule?

This article is accompanied by the third of 6 cleaning schedules, one per area in your house. The use of this schedule is simple: print it out, put it somewhere easily accessible but out of sight (on the inside of a cupboard door, for example), and put a pen near it. Each time you clean behind your books, write down the ..[date].. / ..[month].. (or the other way around, for you Americans) on the dotted lines for reference, so you can keep track! For the once-a-month thing, you can either just cross it off with a checkmark or write down the day of the week there as well, so you do it around the same day of the month each month.