The Perfect Home? It’s A Myth!
Everyone likes to take pride in their home, of course, they do! Your home is the place you spend the majority of your time, where you make memories, where you entertain friends and family. It’s only natural that you’re going to want to take some pride in making it as nice as you can. However, there’s a lot of pressure around for your house not just to be clean, not just to be nice, but to be perfect. Now, it hardly takes a genius to realize that this is a pretty unrealistic expectation. After all the vast majority of people have to deal with work, kids, a social life, and actually getting a decent night’s sleep now and then! Where are we supposed to fit the fortnightly steam cleaner work into this? Considering just how full and busy a lot of people’s lives are, it’s impossible to imagine that anyone would be able to put in the time and effort needed to create the “perfect house.” You would either keel over from exhaustion, or you’d end up never having the time to do anything else. Either way, that’s no way to live your life!
And the truth this, the perfect home doesn’t exist. TV, magazines and competitive neighbors might make you think that it’s something that you could achieve if you only put in the right amounts of effort but in truth that’s all fake too. Home on TV and in magazines have entire teams dedicated to making it seem perfect for just a split second, and your neighbor likely has the same closet filled with junk in their house as you do. So, instead of trying to achieve some kind of impossible, perfect house, here are some ways to learn to love the house that you’re in while making it as nice as possible.
Dust happens, get over it
Your house is going to have dust in it. I’ll give you a moment to get over the shock of that statement. We all know the stereotype of someone dragging their finger over a surface to see if they can find a single spot of dust anywhere which makes people assume that their home is a complete pig sty if every surface isn’t buffed to a mirror shine every single day. But in reality, dust is going to happen, just by living in your house you create dust every minute of every day, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The best thing is just to set aside a specific time to do the dusting every week. That way you’re not going to let it get to the point where the dust is starting build up, but you’re also not wasting time every couple of hours re-dusting something that you’ve already dusted a dozen times. Alternatively, you can change out your air filters at regular intervals. For the most part, homes use standard sized air filters ranging from as small as 10x10x1 to as big as 20x20x1 air filters, and some homes use even larger air filters. Get in the habit of examining your air filters at least once a month. If they need changed, change them, otherwise your home’s energy efficiency could suffer.
Find a place for everything
There’s a lot of stuff floating around on the internet these days about living the “minimalist” lifestyle. While that sounds incredibly nice for someone living alone in a loft studio apartment without many things, to begin with, those of us with likely more complicated aren’t really going to be able to do that. Try explaining to your kids why you’ve thrown away half their toys. It’s unlikely that they’ll accept “minimalist aesthetics” as an excuse! Instead, try to think about the things that you do have and find a place for them. The real reason people’s homes become cluttered is that they don’t put things in a proper place and just sort of dump them wherever they want. By making sure everything is in its right place you’ll actually find that your home feels far less cluttered. Not only that but it will become far easier to tidy.
Get some help
Of course, if you’re usually working or you have little ones to look after, it can feel impossible to take the time to get any cleaning done whatsoever. Luckily there are plenty of cleaning services available to lend you a hand. Having a cleaner come in to do some of the jobs that you can deal with is going to help you keep your house as presentable as you want it without you having to break your back constantly when you’d much rather be spending time with your family or, God forbid, relaxing!
Remember, if life has you completely and totally exhausted and you decide to put off doing the vacuuming or something for a day or two, there’s nothing wrong with that. Trying to force yourself to make your home reach some impossible standard at the expense of everything else in your life is just going to end up making you feel completely and utterly miserable.