Or ways to remove that accumulation fast?
Non-vacuum cleaner tips would be more actionable for me currently, but please do share your ways.
I wait until it starts getting noticable. Then I spend an hour cleaning - prioritizing the stuff that I’d be most embarrassed for a guest to see. After an hour the house is usually back below noticable levels of dirty. It’s never pristine but at least I have a facade of being a functional adult.
I also suck at this. There is a lazy way though you’ll have to accept a certain look. My great grandmother had doilies everywhere. Every surface was covered. Most nearly completely, a few of the bigger tables just had a small one. Once a week she would collect them all and wash them. I didn’t realize till much later in life that the purpose they served was to collect dust to keep it off your surfaces.
I wonder if something more aesthetically passing to the modern eye would be as effective or if the intricate lace is important to the function.
I don’t agree on the HEPA level sterility. Dust is not a nuclear waste.
Dust tends to accumulate in quiet areas, like corners and under furniture where air currents from movement don’t disturb it.
Just keep those areas clean with a dustpan and the whole remains tolerable. Although rugs need to be taken outside and beaten from time to time.
Oh shit, dust exists.
I used to have a very large air filter standing in the corner of my room. It wouldn’t eliminate the need to vacuum, but it would reduce the dust in the air and make it less noticeable. I got rid of it because the filter cartridges were sorta discontinued/really expensive
Kipple is unavoidable, but an air filter helps a lot more than you think.
Also if you have pets, might be worth it to get a robot vacuum. Even the 3+ year old models are still great.
Can confirm. With a dog who sheds enough hair to build a statue of himself every week, a robot vacuum has been a great help. Just make sure to get one with a self-emptying bin, or your gonna be emptying it yourself after every lap around the house, and it’ll be more tedious than just vacuuming yourself.
I really want one that self-empties, seems so convenient. After my current one dies, I’ll def get one.
Don’t have dogs. Don’t have woodburners. Don’t have horses. In fact, don’t live any kind of outdoorsy life if you want a dust-free home.
My home is dusty. I decided that the above was more important to me.
Before someone visits.
This is the truth. The pandemic really messed up my house because we stopped cleaning when people stopped coming over, and now it is so bad that we still don’t have people coming over. Add to that having a kid who doesn’t want to ever get rid of any of her old toys, and 2 parents trying hard to not let depression win… I don’t think we’ll ever have a clean house again.
If you have the means, I highly suggest hiring a cleaner to help out. You can find them relatively cheap, under $100.
having a kid who doesn’t want to ever get rid of any of her old toys
Do it for her then. I purge and donate my child’s toys every couple of months. It would be chaos otherwise.
wow, I can’t imagine randomly losing your possibly favorite toys every couple of months would have any sort of effect on a person when they become an adult. How many toys are you buying your kids throughout the year?!? Just get them proper storage and explain to them their items need to fit into it (shelves, toy chests. etc). Let them decide which items when it gets too much, you’re gonna have a hoarder on your hands when they get older if they always fear losing their items or never learn to let go of things they don’t need anymore.
Our kid is kinda spoiled and also needs her stuff purged every now and then. It’s pretty easy to tell which toys she cherishes and which ones have been sitting in pieces in the bottom of a tub for the last 6 months. I’m sure most people that do this will get their kid involved in the process. Hoarding can also lead to lasting effects as an adult. Imagine what their friends and classmates think about the clutter when they see or hear about it.
Ok let me ask my two year old what he thinks. He responds very well to reason.
That’s… how children learn?
I will encourage ya to try making the effort wherever and whenever you can. Even just five minutes today can save half an hour weeks down the line.
I’ve a friend from high school whose parents are disabled and struggle with keeping up with the routine chores, and she herself suffers from bad depression and executive dysfunction.
Their house is in such a state now that we’d need to get our entire friend group up there to spend multiple days across multiple weeks to get it cleaned, organized, and fixed up. Flies everywhere, food rotting in the fridges, pet hair and dust everywhere, the works. It’ll be doable, but it’s gonna be a whole thing we gotta do.
Hope I’m not shaming ya here, I promise that ain’t my intent here - just hoping that our situation can inspire somebody else to prevent themselves ending up in the same spot.
I have dust mite allergies. 2 most important changes I did were:
(1) no carpets, no curtains, only tile floors.
(2) and I love my robot vaccuum. They do 80% of the work, daily, whilst I’m away.
Do you have dust mite resistant sheet covers, that was the biggest improvement for me
- 1 for using the word whilst betwixt daily and I’m.
As someone with ADHD I actually keep a broom leaning against my standing desk and sweep to busy my hands whenever I’m thinking or on a call. Dusting/washing walls simply doesn’t happen in our household due to how many steps are involved - but for most other cleaning we build it into tasks - so as I cook I clean cookware as I go - when I finish showering I squeegee the glass, and there’s cleaning fluid within reach if I notice build up.
These are all really exploits designed to help ADHD people do shit but maybe they’ll help you!
My wife and I debate about dust. I view as perfectly natural thing that should just be let be and she argues that im an idiot. She wins those debates.
Your wife is correct
she won me over a bit but now she wants dusting done even if no dust is visible. preposterous!
cleaning it before it becomes a problem is how you keep it from becoming a problem
visible signs are not a problem though. there is nothing there yet. its like cleaning dishes that are already cleaned or folding laundry again that sitting folder already.
When I was with my ex: every saturday morning. It sucked, but the reward of both chilling on the sofa in the afterglow of a clean apartment was awesome. God I miss that.
Now: rarely. If it begins to affect my mental health, I might pick up clothing off the floor. I don’t clean for myself, I clean for the happiness of others
Don’t live near dirt, wind or rain. Don’t bring cardboard into the house. Don’t allow animals in the house, including humans. Keep the house temperature over 2000.
Keep the house temperature over 2000.
Only fire may cleanse this dirty world around us.
Now I have a layer of ash, what now?
Is there dust on the ash?
As @xmunk said, cleaning needs to be embedded in other tasks. If you cannot figure out how to embed a given task then you can set it for a fixed schedule. For example, you say that you clean your desk or office on Saturday morning and you have a given set of steps you accomplish.
Another trick I learned from corporate world is to delegate the tasks. It is more manageable to follow up on someone doing it for you than you actually doing it. This can be someone else living with you, or someone you can hire to do. For example, you can hire someone to clean the house every Sunday. This later option could be expensive.
If you want to embed tasks and do it yourself, then you need to make them easy for you, for example, you can overstock cleaning products. Let’s say you have a kitchen microfiber towel that hangs nearby and a dedicated cleaning product at reach. You consider that a meal (launch or dinner) equals, fetching the ingredients, cooking, eating and cleaning dishes, putting away dishes, and finally cleaning them. If you don’t clean dishes then you consider you did not finish your dinner.
Same thing for the bathroom, you need cleaning tools at reach when you are in the bathroom, don’t reuse kitchen stuff to clean the bathroom. Then when you shower, you clean the bathtub, the mirror, the sink, your underwear, wipe the floor, etc.
Same thing for the bathroom, you need cleaning tools at reach when you are in the bathroom, don’t reuse kitchen stuff to clean the bathroom.
Bleh, this reminded me of a housemate who insisted that buying two of a cleaning product was a waste of money and space and then routinely lose them. Very annoy. Big fan of keeping stuff for cleaning a space around that space instead of the other side of the house.
If you have HVAC, make sure the filter is replaced regularly and try running a higher MERV filter.
