4 Helpful Ways To Maintain The Cleanliness Of Your Home (Habits That Stick)

Updated October 2026. Four cleaning habits rewritten with a weekly plan, time figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and allergy and indoor air numbers from AAFA and EPA, all checked this month.

The easiest way to maintain the cleanliness of your home is four habits: make the bed every morning, do a load of laundry before it piles up, book one deep-cleaning day a month, and split chores with everyone who lives there. As of October 2026, BLS data shows Americans already spend about 2 hours a day on household activities. Habits make those hours count.

Jump to: 🏠 Make the bed · 🪜 Deep-cleaning day · ⏱️ Laundry · 🤝 Everyone helps · 💲 Before you sell · ❓ FAQ

Most people don’t have a cleaning problem. They have a pile-up problem. A sink full of dishes, a chair covered in clothes, a hallway of shoes. None of it takes long to fix on its own, but it all builds up when nobody owns it. The four habits below are small on purpose. They cut the pile-up, so the big jobs stay manageable.

Why does making your bed every morning keep the whole house cleaner?

It takes about two minutes, and it changes how the rest of the room looks. A made bed is the largest flat surface in a bedroom. When it’s neat, a stray shirt on the floor looks out of place, so you pick it up. When it’s a tangle, everything else blends into the mess.

Use the moment as a quick sweep. While you pull up the covers, grab the glass on the nightstand, put the clothes in the hamper and open the blinds. That’s it. You aren’t cleaning the room. You’re resetting it, and a reset room is far easier to vacuum or dust later in the week.

There’s a health side too. Wash sheets and pillowcases weekly in hot water. Dust mites live in bedding, and AAFA lists them among the common indoor allergy triggers. With roughly 1 in 3 people in the U.S. living with allergies, according to AAFA, clean bedding is an easy win.

How often should you schedule a deep-cleaning day?

Once a month works for most homes, or every two months if the house is small and nobody has allergies. Daily tidying handles the surfaces you see. A deep clean handles the ones you don’t: baseboards, the top of the fridge, behind the couch, window tracks, the oven and the inside of the dishwasher.

Put it on the calendar like an appointment, and give each session a short list so it ends. Here’s a simple rotation:

• Month one: kitchen appliances, cabinet fronts and the pantry.
• Month two: bathrooms, grout, the exhaust fan and under the sinks.
• Month three: windows, blinds, baseboards and light fixtures.
• Month four: carpets, upholstery, mattresses and closets.

Windows take longer than you think. Our tips for cleaning window panes without streaks speed that job up. Bathrooms deserve their own plan because moisture invites mold; see how to make your bathroom a room of health and cleanliness.

You don’t have to do it alone. A professional cleaning service can take the heavy jobs once or twice a year, like steam-cleaning carpets, couches and mattresses. After that, the monthly session is mostly upkeep. One caution from EPA: many cleaning and disinfecting products release VOCs, and some organic pollutants test 2 to 5 times higher indoors than outside. Open a window and use only what the label calls for.

What’s the best way to stop laundry from taking over?

Do a little every day instead of saving it all for one day. One of the classic secrets for a clean house is to not let your laundry pile up until laundry day. A mountain of clothes is discouraging, so it sits. One load is a 10-minute job spread across the day.

A rhythm that works for a family of four: start a load before breakfast, move it to the dryer at lunch or after work, and fold it while the TV is on. Folding takes about as long as one episode’s opening credits and an ad break. Put clothes away the same evening, or the clean pile becomes the new chair pile.

Give each person a basket. Kids old enough to carry it can bring it to the machine and take their folded clothes back. Towels and sheets get their own day so they never mix with the daily load. If your laundry room makes this harder than it should be, our tips for remodeling your laundry room cover shelving, sorting space and a folding counter.

How do you get everyone in the house to help?

Make it specific and make it visible. “Help out more” doesn’t work. “You clear the table and load the dishwasher on weeknights” does. When everyone owns a task, cleaning and maintaining the house’s cleanliness stops being a one-person job, and that person stops burning out.

The numbers explain why sharing matters. In BLS’s 2025 American Time Use Survey, 87% of women and 75% of men did some household activity on an average day. On those days, women spent 2.8 hours and men 2.1 hours. That gap is the hour somebody resents.

Some ground rules that hold up:

• Post a chore chart on the fridge and rotate it every Sunday.
• Match chores to age: toddlers put toys in a bin, kids set the table, teens vacuum and take out trash.
• Keep bleach and strong chemicals away from young children.
• Agree on a 15-minute evening reset where everyone tidies one room at once.

Storage helps more than willpower. When every item has a home, putting it away is easy. Our guide on why storage space is useful when organizing and cleaning your home has ideas for small spaces. For the reasons behind all this, from pests to indoor air, read why you should clean your house regularly.

Do these habits help when you sell your home?

A lot. A house that’s kept clean is a few hours away from listing photos, not a stressful week. NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Staging found 83% of buyers’ agents say staging makes it easier for buyers to picture a home as their future home. Staging starts with clean, clear rooms.

Before you list, do one extra deep clean, clear the counters and pack away most personal items. Our home staging tips walk through each room, and the 10 commandments of selling or renting your home cover the rest of the prep.

If you’d like to sell and keep control of showings, a Beycome flat fee MLS listing starts at $99, with $0 due to Beycome at closing, in 17 states and DC. Every plan includes ShowingTime scheduling where the MLS offers it, so you can plan visits around your cleaning days. Buying your next place? The Beycome buyer program has no upfront fee. Beycome keeps 1% of the price (minimum $1,499) and credits the rest of the buyer-agent commission at closing, with lender approval. It’s open to every buyer on homes listed by other agents (the commission credit can’t apply where no buyer-agent commission is offered, like most FSBO homes, or on homes listed by Beycome sellers).

Questions about keeping a house clean