Introduction
Everyone likes back-to-school shopping and hates back-to-school cleaning. Those are just universal truths. If you homeschool your kids, they are going to be back in the school premises in the next spring or going to be back on those Zoom calls and you’ll have to prepare your home for the transition. You can make things easy by searching for “home cleaning services near me” and hiring professionals to do your bidding. Otherwise, you can start cleaning yourself. Check out these awesome back to school cleaning tips to make your job easier:
Tips & Tricks
- The entryway – While this space remains relatively clean during the vacation, it gets a lot of traffic during the school year. You need to make plenty of preparations if you want to keep this area clean. Designate storage shelves or boxes for everything including backpacks, keys, shoes, and coats. Nothing fancy, a shoe shelf with a few hooks on the wall is a good start.
You can also buy a plastic shoe mat so that your kids can leave a set of dirty shoes by the entryway each day and wear a clean pair the next day. This also helps to reduce decision fatigue and your kids don’t have to waste time deciding on a pair of shoes every morning. The mat also catches the dirt and spraying it once a week with water should get rid of that and wash away all the germs.
It’s also important to wash backpacks every once in a while. Turn them inside out and throw them in the washer every month or every two weeks. A gentle cycle with a mild detergent should get the job done. After that, you can lay it out to dry over the weekend.
- Kitchen – School days are nothing short of a battle every morning. You need to get up early and prepare the kitchen and pantry for an early breakfast and pack lunches. Vinegar is your best friend in this scenario. You can mix it with warm water and use it to quickly scrub countertops, mop floors, and even disinfect trash cans.
Next, go through the pantry and the fridge and get rid of anything that has been sitting there for months or expired. Those pantry and refrigerator shelves can also do with a vinegar and water wipe down. It also neutralizes any food odors. When you restock the fridge, make sure that it contains essentials, and leftovers are always pushed to the front.
To make things easier, you can also set up a snack and lunch station. It can be a drawer set aside for water bottles and food storage containers. It can also be a place to store after-school snacks. Just make sure that you empty and wipe down the lunchboxes every night.
Check the water dispenser and the faucet filter and make sure they are in working order. They are going to be extensively used and you want to get them replaced if they aren’t doing their job. To keep the balance and make this work, you’ll also need to set aside around 10 minutes each night for resetting the kitchen. Wipe down surfaces, reassess stock in the fridge and pull leftovers to the front to make sure they get eaten.
- Vehicles – You also need to think outside the box when cleaning and prepping for the school year. In this case, you need to think about your car. It needs to be clean since it’s the first place your children will be in when you pick them up from school. That makes them the perfect ground for germ transfers.
Remove the seat fabric of your car and wash them by hand or on a gentle cycle with cold water. You can also snap pictures to remind yourself of the reassembling process. After you wash the seat fabric and hang them dry, use your vacuum to pick up crumbs on the seat, under the seat, and on the car floor. You can also wipe down the seat belts and buckles with a microfiber cloth.
If you need to deep clean the interior of your car before the school season starts, you can get it to the car wash or hire the services of a cleaning service. After that, you can stock up on cleaning wipes to disinfect and touch up gear knobs, buttons, steering wheels, seat belts, and door handles.
- Laundry – When you have clean and fresh clothes neatly organized for the school day, the mornings seem brighter and less hectic. Kids grow quickly and that’s why you need to make sure their clothing fits on the school day.
You can also optimize your mornings if you show your kids where you put their clothes and also make them put items back after use. It should be at a low and accessible position where children can reach easily. This way your kids know where to look for fresh and clean clothes, so those mornings aren’t wasted. Putting things back in their place also lets them find their notebooks and other stationery items easily.
You can also segment their clothes in drawers. One for shirts, one for pajamas, and one for pants. This lets your kids find their clothes with ease without wasting time sorting through a pile. You can also establish a designated place for dirty laundry. The hamper may be set below the stairs, in the kid’s room, or in the laundry room. Make sure the kids know where to put their dirty laundry so that you don’t waste time picking up clothes.
- Disinfect high traffic areas – Your hands touch so many surfaces throughout the day and facilitate the spread of germs. That’s why it’s important to disinfect areas that are touched frequently by everyone in the household. Bring up the trusty vinegar solution and clean the doorknobs, light switches, faucet handles, and other such places.
Conclusion
Now that you know all these back-to-school cleaning tips, it’s time to get the cleaning supplies and tools and start using that elbow grease. If things get too overwhelming, you can always search for “home cleaning services near me” and let the pros share your burden.
