Strategies to Cleaning
To keep a house clean, one needs a good strategy. Even a small place like mine is in need of some form of systematic cleaning plan. Everyone has their own gauge of mess-tolerance and their own unique cleaning style. My mess-tolerance for my home generally fluctuates somewhere around the mid-range level. My floors are never quite clean enough to eat off of, but the city has never declared my place a landfill. The fact that my tolerance fluctuates at all is a sign of tremendous growth when you consider that my childhood bedroom was often referred to as the pigpen.
When cleaning, I like to try varied approaches depending on my mood at the time. Sometimes I will try the Bounce Approach, where I focus on one task and then the next, with less emphasis on cleaning a particular room. An example of this approach would be to clean the bathroom sink and then go to the bedroom to make the bed and then return to the bathroom to sweep the floor. Obviously the bounce form of cleaning does waste time and energy, but it does allow for picking and choosing the tasks that I really want to do and to avoid cleaning the oven for as long as possible.
The opposite of the bounce approach is a form I call Convict Cleaning. This style of cleaning is the one room at a time approach. An example of this would be to go in the bathroom and clean everything from top to bottom until the entire room is cleaned. While this approach is economical in both time and energy, it does have a way of bringing about childhood memories of being sentenced to my bedroom for an entire Saturday until the room is cleaned.
Another approach to cleaning that I sometimes do is Reminiscence Cleaning. This approach to cleaning begins with good intentions, but somehow the task of cleaning gets lost along the way. An example of this method often occurs when I decide to organize and clean my junk-drawer. Soon the contents from the drawer are surrounding me in seperate stacks and piles, and I eventually get lost in reading old letters and looking at photographs from the past. Very little organizing and cleaning is accomplished in this approach, but it is fun to do now and then.
Of course there are many other approaches to cleaning a home. Years ago when I was sharing a place with a particular girlfriend, we practiced the She Knows Best form of cleaning. This approach is when the woman of the house wants to do all the cleaning herself, not only because she knows in her heart that she cleans best, but she also has a strong belief that the male in the house is an idiot.
Admittedly, on some rare occasions I have practiced the strategy of Politician Style cleaning. An example of this method would be when company is coming over and I resort to shoving everything into a closet or sweeping things under a rug. I first tried this form of cleaning when I was a child, but apparently Mother’s are aware of this approach to cleaning.
For today, I have decided to use the Minimalist Approach to cleaning. This form of cleaning is almost spiritual in nature, allowing the cleaner to focus on one particular area to be cleaned and then becoming one with that area. For example, Z. There, I just cleaned the letter ‘Z’ on my keyboard and I’m done with cleaning for the day. While this approach may be spiritually gratifying, it takes forever to clean an entire home.