Is your home design making it difficult for you to clean your house? Well, you’re not the only one. When decorating their homes, many people choose style over functionality, but pretty soon, they start regretting those decisions.
Now, no one says that you need to sacrifice style and décor for the sake of having an easy-to-clean home. Quite the contrary, you can design a home that is both stylish and easy to clean.
If you’re skeptical about this, let’s see 8 simple design ideas for an easy-to-clean home that doesn’t lack style.
1. Choose the right flooring options
Starting from the floor up, the first thing that you should consider when designing your home is flooring. You already know that floors get dirty pretty fast and cleaning them isn’t always the most fun, is it? So, what sort of floors can be both stylish and easy to clean?
For once, the smartest thing would be to never use carpets in high-traffic areas. Areas such as hallways, living room, kitchen, as well as dining room are considered to be high-traffic, so instead of carpets, install hardwood or luxury vinyl floors. Installing carpets is okay in rooms such as bedrooms, where you don’t have many people walking on them.
Having an easy to clean floors can also be very beneficial in cases when you’re moving houses. End-of-lease cleaning can be a nightmare, so finding ways to make it easier on you is always a good idea. Even if you hire professional end-of-lease cleaning services, easy-to-clean floors are always a welcome design solution.
2. Use high-gloss paint
Unlike mate paint, high-gloss paint is easy to clean and maintain. Walls get dirty whether or not you have children and pets around. So, to make your home easy to clean but still nicely decorated and painted, you should give high-gloss paint a try.
This type of paint can be cleaned with soapy water and a sponge. When cleaning the walls, start from the bottom and work your way down. Make sure you rinse the sponge with clean water and when you’re done, use a dry paper towel or a cloth to dry the surface.
3. Opt for easy-to-clean upholstery fabrics
There is one easy-to-clean upholstery fabric, that is durable and stain-resistant – and yes, we’re talking about leather. Many people love leather because it’s easy to maintain, you can just wipe it off if something is spilled on it.
Other fabrics that may not be as effortless to clean as leather, but are pretty good substitute options include microfiber, velvet, and vinyl to name a few.
4. Curtains are better than blinds
Blinds are a nightmare for people with allergies and respiratory issues because they are dust magnets. And cleaning and washing the blinds is also not something you would enjoy doing because it’s a constant struggle to keep them clean.
Instead, why wouldn’t you replace the heavy, difficult-to-clean blinds with light and airy, and washable curtains? When you notice that they are getting dirty or dusty, simply put the curtains in the machine, and in no time, you’ll have them clean and ready to be hung again.
5. Invest in more built-in storage
Storage is something that we all need more of at some point in our lives. If you look around your house, you’ll notice all these knick-knacks and items lying around when they could be neatly stored away.
To help you hide all your clutter, consider investing in more built-in storage. With more storage space of this kind, all the items will be stored away and your house will be much cleaner and more organized.
For example, a very popular and very useful kitchen trend is an appliance garage. An appliance garage is a built-in cabinet designed to store all your small kitchen appliances such as toasters, coffee machines, mixers, and so on. With a cabinet like this, your kitchen will look cleaner and much more clutter-free.
6. Place laundry and laundry room in the most convenient place
Many people create their laundry stations either in the basement or in a garage. To be honest, both of these places are the least convenient when it comes to doing laundry, aren’t they? First, because you need to gather all your laundry in one place and then carry it to the garage or basement, that same process needs to be repeated when you finish washing and folding.
Why don’t you just make a laundry room where you find it most convenient? Right next to your master bedroom or at least near it. That way all the dirty clothes will go directly to the laundry room and when cleaned straight back to your closet.
So, no huge piles of dirty and clean clothes need to be taken to and from the basement laundry station.
7. Leave no space behind the toilet
Cleaning the toilet is not the problem, cleaning the space behind it is. The small gap between the wall and the toilet is not only difficult to get to but a lot of times almost impossible. And it gets dirty and dusty really fast.
To avoid these sorts of issues, consider installing the toilet so that there is no space between it and the wall. Or, leave more space between them so that you can access this space more easily.
8. Install new countertops
Certain kitchen countertop materials make the counter look dirtier than it is. Take marble as an example, marble countertops are top-of-the-line, very expensive but also very impractical. Marble is porous and as such when it gets dirty and it’s impossible to clean. So, your new marble countertop will look old and dirty pretty fast.
Instead, look for countertop materials that are durable and easy to maintain. Quartz, granite, laminate, and similar options are good substitutes for marble kitchen countertops.
As you can see, designing an easy-to-clean home won’t take away from its style. Quite the contrary, it will create a stylish house that is easy to maintain and clean. And let’s not forget that a clean home is a stylish home.