When your three-year-old spills water all over the floor or leaves his or her toys strewn across the house, you may find yourself spending the majority of the day feeling like a human vacuum cleaner, following him around and cleaning up every mess. But toddlers need to learn to keep clean just like every other family member in your house, and there’s no better time to teach them than now.

Toddlers will get a kick out of cleaning, so you’ll hear less whining and more “Ok!” responses if you maintain the enthusiasm. Don’t command, “Lucy, clean up this room now!” Instead, excitedly say, “Lucy, let’s clean up! It’s fun!” Follow up with an engaging cleaning song or a CD, make a game about cleaning quickly, and boom, you’re done in ten minutes.

Read more >

Sometimes we feel like we’re leading double lives—our first career and then our second, unpaid job of house cleaner/manager. Housework should never fall on one person alone. Even if a couple decides that one person will work while the other stays at home to take care of it, it’s still important for everyone to pick up after themselves and respect one another.

When the members of a household start taking one person for granted because he or she tends to do all of the laundry, dishes, dusting, or all of the chores completely, not only is it hurtful and disrespectful for that person—it’s also quite slovenly of the rest of the house! If you, for example, microwave a bowl of chili and simply leave your microwave mess because “so-and-so will clean it,” there is a problem. But it’s an easy enough problem to fix. Here are some tips to use in dividing up household chores.

Read more >

Many of the products that we use daily to care for our homes and lawns can be very dangerous and leads to air pollution and water pollution, can kill local marine life, our pets, and even our own children. But there are great tried and tested ways to clean your home that are natural and safe for you and the environment. Here are some quick tips for replacing ten of the most common house hold chemicals that can be pollutants:

Chlorine Bleach: Adding just a ½ of a cup of white vinegar to the water when you do your laundry can brighten your clothes without the need of using harmful bleach.

Fabric Softener: When your laundry is going through the rinse cycle, just as a quarter of a cup (half a cup for larger loads) of baking soda to the water to help soften your clothes.

Read more >

How to cheat at cleaning

When you move into your own place as you jump into the hectic pace of a work-life, maintaining a nice, clean and comfy home is one of the hardest challenges you will face. At least that's what we found out. Well, that's why, in many ways, this book turned out to be a life-saver. Concise and easy-to-read, How To Cheat At Cleaning: Time-Slashing Techniques to Cut Corners and Restore Your Sanity detailed various useful ways in which you could keep your little place smelling minty fresh.

Read more >

Seventh GenerationIf you’re really into eco-friendly cleaning, you may already make your own cleaners out of baking soda and vinegar, scent your home with natural essential oils, and favor good old-fashioned elbow grease rather than harsh chemicals. Go, you pioneer, you!

But if you really want to be ecologically conscious while you clean but you don’t know where to start, or you’re just intimidated by creating your own cleaners, there are many good cleaning products on the market that will get the job done without leaving a huge carbon footprint. Here is a short guide to some of these:

Read more >