No, we haven't failed to notice the
anything-but-spring conditions that our neck of the woods has been
graced with in the last week: it's as wintery as ever here, we know.
But it is March, a popular time of year for people start thinking of
giving their homes a little extra TLC. This isn't a superfluous task:
maintenance of our properties is every bit as important as the
financial investments we make in them—whether by means of
insurance, or upgrades, and so forth. In fact, maintaining your
property is a kind of insurance: it protects your home from undue
harm and deterioration which may cost you a great deal to repair. You
know the old adage: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
So get preventing! To get the most from your efforts, streamline your
work with a plan:
Set goals. Make a list of
each area in your home that you plan to address...but don't stop
there: organizational gurus say that task lists in and of themselves
aren't enough for us to meet our goals. We have to assign a specific
time to each of those tasks in order for them to actually get done.
When we treat those assigned times as appointments, we are far more
likely to accomplish those items that made it onto our lists to begin
with.
Check your arsenal.
Before you launch your attack, ensure that you have all of the
supplies and equipment you will need. Nothing spoils a morning begun
with good intentions like the inability to follow through with those
intentions, simply because you can't find a replacement bag for your
vacuum. One way that you can plan your supplies effectively is to go
back to the task list you initially drew up; beside each task, jot
down the items required for its completion. Once you've done this for
every task on the list, check for all of the supplies you noted, and
acquire whatever is missing.
Purge. In the interest of
efficiency, resolve not to waste time cleaning around clutter. The
easiest room to clean is a sparse one—or at least one where there
are no knick-knacks and tchotchkes for you to dexterously dance
around with your duster. There is no room for clutter in the
clean-o-sphere. The point here isn't simply to find a nice little box
to hide it all away: rather, get rid of as much of it as you can. The
less you have to maintain, the more likely you are to do this kind of
maintenance regularly, keeping your home in tip-top shape.
Work top-down. To avoid
having to re-address an area you just cleaned, start at the highest
elevation of the room you are working on, and continue downwards.
This way, you won't have to re-sweep your floor several times, as you
knock dust onto it with every shelf you clean. Start with ceilings
and high shelves, and finish with floors and baseboards.
No comments:
Post a Comment