When a FAILRY Clean Home Is Better than a PERFECTLY Clean Home

A fair clean home all of the time is much better than a home that is perfectly clean occasionally, and a mess for most of the time.

Some time ago, I went to visit a friend, and at some point during my visit, I needed to use the bathroom.

When I asked her if I could use the restroom, she looked embarrassed.

“Yes, it’s over here,” she said. “But I have to apologize. I haven’t gone in to clean it in three weeks.”

That surprised me because her family room, where we had been sitting, was very, very clean.

I told her not to worry. I would always rather use the private bathroom in the home of someone I know than a public restroom. I tried to make light of it.

But I could tell she was mortified.

And, indeed, the bathroom was very dirty.

When I came out, she apologized again.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so embarrassed. But I haven’t been able to set aside enough time in my schedule to take care of the bathroom.” Then she said it usually takes her a whole morning or afternoon to clean the bathroom.

This led to a conversation about housekeeping. As we talked about the challenges of doing housework, I realized that she he loved some aspects of cleaning: sweeping, dusting and vacuuming. She liked picking things up and putting things away.

What she didn’t like was cleaning anything that required water, detergent and a lot of scrubbing. And those are the kinds of tasks that a bathroom requires.

Why Cleaning Had Become Such a Big Project

I asked her why she felt she needed to set aside a full morning or afternoon to clean the bathroom.

“Well,” she said, “because that’s what it takes to get a sparkling clean bathroom.”

I suggested that perhaps she was making the job harder than it needed to be.

What if she didn’t clean the entire bathroom at once? What if, instead, she divided the work into small pieces?

🟣 One day, clean the toilet.

🟣 Another day, clean the sink.

🟣 Another day, clean the bathtub.

🟣 Another day, mop the floor.

🟣 Another day, wash the towels.

None of those individual tasks would take very long.

The idea was not to have a sparkling clean bathroom every few weeks. The idea was to have a bathroom that was fairly clean all the time.

She was resistant to the idea, but she agreed to give it a try.

Small Tasks Can Change How You Feel About Your Home

A few months later, I ran into her again, and she told me that it was working.

She had started taking care of something in the bathroom every two or three days.

🟣 One day, she would clean the toilet.

🟣 A couple of days later, she would clean the floors.

🟣 A couple of days later, she would clean the sink.

🟣 And then another day, she would launder the towels.

She had even given herself enough license to sweep the bathroom one day and mop it the next. 

And now, she said, her bathroom was always fairly clean.

She also noticed that seeing one part of her bathroom clean encouraged her to clean more things. 

She told me, “I do miss those days when I would take a few hours to clean the bathroom, and then it was completely sparkling clean. But I would rather have a bathroom that is always fairly clean than have a sparkling clean bathroom every three weeks — or sometimes every month.”

Exactly.

She Did the Same Thing in the Kitchen

Her kitchen was another area that wasn’t always as clean as she wanted it to be, and sometimes was a source of embarrassment. 

It had the same problem: water, scrubbing, wiping, mopping and all those little tasks that can make cleaning feel like a big project.

She lived alone, and she thought that she didn’t use enough dishes in a day to justify running the dishwasher. Her intent was to wash everything by hand right after every meal, but instead the dishes accumulated in the sink. The reason she avoided hand washing her dishes was that she didn’t like to dry them.

I suggested that she change that habit.

Instead of leaving dishes in the sink, she could simply rinse whatever she had used and put it directly into the dishwasher. Then she could run the dishwasher whenever it was full — or whenever she was running out of the things she needed.

She figured out that she could put dishes and pots used during the day int he dishwasher, then run a light cycle at night — even if the dishwasher wasn’t full. Right after starting it, she’d grab a clean microfiber cloth and quickly wipe down the kitchen counters and other surfaces. It wasn’t a deep clean, just a quick spruce-up. But it made a big difference. In doing this, she was following the one-wipe method that you may read about here. She emptied the dishwasher first thing in the morning. Everything was dry so she didn’t have to worry about that. 

Then she divided the bigger jobs.

🟣 One day, she would deep clean the kitchen sink.

🟣 Another day, the stovetop.

🟣 Another day, she might mop the floor.

She didn’t need to clean the entire kitchen every time she cleaned something in the kitchen.

She gave herself permission to wipe down the inside of the fridge one day, and to clean the inside of the refrigerator doors the next.

One day she decided that it made sense to mop the bathroom floors right after she mopped the kitchen floors, since the mop and cleaning products were already out. 

When she tackled the parts of housework she didn’t like as mini projects instead of large projects, everything became more manageable. 

You Don’t Have to Finish Everything at Once

I think many of us make cleaning much harder than it needs to be because we think we have to finish what we started. We imagine that if we’re going to clean the bathroom, we need to clean the entire bathroom. If we’re going to clean the kitchen, we need to clean the entire kitchen.

If we don’t have two or three uninterrupted hours available, we decide that there’s no point in starting.

But there is a lot of value in doing one small thing.

🟣 Clean the toilet.

🟣 Wipe the bathroom sink.

🟣 Clean the stovetop.

🟣 Mop the kitchen floor.

🟣 Wash the towels.

These small tasks may not give you that wonderful feeling of standing back and looking at an entire room that you have just deep cleaned. But they give you something else: the satisfaction of knowing that you are taking care of your home.

And that matters.

When your home is messy or neglected, it can be difficult to feel good about yourself. But when your home is clean and cared for, you naturally feel a sense of pride. Your home tells you that you are taking care of your surroundings, and that you are capable of getting things done.

Make Cleaning Fit Into Your Life

Your home doesn’t have to be perfectly clean to feel good.

In fact, I think there is something to be said for letting go of the idea that every cleaning project needs to be completed from beginning to end before you can feel productive.

Instead, look at your home as something you take care of a little bit at a time.

Maybe you have ten minutes today. Use those ten minutes to clean the bathroom sink. Tomorrow, clean the toilet. The next day, mop the floors. The day after that, vacuum the bedroom.

You may be surprised by how much you can accomplish when you stop waiting for the perfect block of time.

My friend discovered that dividing her cleaning into small, manageable tasks meant that she was doing something every day to care for her home.

And the result wasn’t a perfectly spotless house.

It was something much more satisfying: A home that was always fairly clean.

Fairly clean every day is much better than sparkling clean once a month!

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