5 ways to keep a clean home — Forever 39 Podcast

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If you've been a fan of Forever 39 from the start, you know we're admitted Type-A clean and neat freaks. For us, we need outer peace to have inner peace, and a clean and neat home goes a long way toward creating that inner peace. And while it's no sweat for either one of us to spend our free time vacuuming, mopping, or dusting — we realize that we're in the minority when it comes to our obsession with cleaning!

So that brings us to why we decided to talk about cleaning in episode 48 of Forever 39. We get asked quite a lot about how we manage to keep things looking so spick-and-span in our respective homes. We have even found that a lot of our friends and family just assume the only reason our homes are so clean is because we spend hours and hours cleaning them from top to bottom. Now, we both admit that we do indeed spend a decent amount of time cleaning, but it's certainly not hours spend daily. So what's our secret?

Well, for starters, we keep up with it. If dishes need washing, they get washed. We don't allow them to pile up in the sink, hoping for some magical creature to bust out the Dawn and clean them. If there's dirt on the rug, we don't wait until our designated cleaning day to deal with it — we handle it right there and then. Wiping down the kitchen and bathroom counters is almost a daily activity, and let's not even discuss the trash! Of course it gets thrown out when it's filled!

And while we could probably write an entire book on keeping a clean home, here are the top five things that work for us:

• Keep up with the housework on a daily basis.
• Don't let the mail pile up. Go through it daily, discarding anything you don't want and using a filing system to keep what you need.
• Do a bi-annual purge of your house, removing any items that you haven't used in one year.
• Take your shoes off at the door so that you avoid carrying outside dirt and grime into the house.
• Set a weekly or bi-monthly time and date in your schedule to do a thorough clean of your house.

If you're a neat and clean freak like us, what works for you? Email us your tips at Forever39@nj1015.com.

Happy cleaning!

Also from this week's Forever 39 podcast — Your wedding day regrets. PLUS: How to avoid holiday weight gain. Click on the podcast player above to hear the entire episode.

Share your thoughts on all of them below, on Twitter, on Facebook or at forever39@nj1015.com.

— Annette and Megan, Forever 39

Join us for next week’s podcast when we chat about the new reasons why women cheat, our favorite Thanksgiving traditions, and the person we most want to trade places with.