Keeping a clean kitchen isn’t just a matter of neatness – it’s a health consideration. A messy kitchen can serve as an invitation for pests, fungus, and harmful bacteria. While cooking, eating, and simply going through the daily tasks in and around the kitchen, it can be difficult to notice small messes piling up into larger ones until you have to take sometimes an entire day, simply to clean through everything. With this in mind, here are some tips for kitchen cleanliness, and the steps that you can take to minimise kitchen mess pileup and develop a more sustainable space for you to cook, clean, and happily live in. (Hint: These tips, if followed, will EASILY become a regular habit!)
The first tip may sound like an easy one, but it is the most important one, and that is clean as you go! Believe me, it will take longer to think about when it will be the best time to do it than just doing it spontaneously – just do it as soon as you notice it!
While cooking or preparing drinks, such as coffee or tea, there are long moments of waiting which leave you plenty of time to stand around in your kitchen, waiting for water to boil, or for toasts to come popping out of the toaster. During these little lulls in active parts of your kitchen activities, rather than spending the time standing around or checking your phone, take the time to make small adjustments in your kitchen. These should not be big tasks, but are preferably small things, that don’t feel like a huge task, since the nature of these things is that, as you start doing one thing – for example, putting the clean dishes away into their proper cabinets, you’ll start finding more and more small things to finish up, like putting the dirty dishes in the newly-cleared dishwasher.
The point of these small tasks is to change the way you view daily tasks, so that rather than feeling bad about not having done the dishes in a few days and being left with a huge pileup to spend an afternoon clearing away, you can feel good for having gotten thesesmall tasks off the list. One of the best ways of getting yourself to feel comfortable doing routine tasks is to establish a good feeling, that of success or relief, rather than the negative feelings of having to do one large tasks.
Speaking of multitasking, you can use these small interim breaks as a way to gamify tidying up. For example, say that you just put the kettle on to boil and have a few minutes of time to kill before the water starts to boil, you can challenge yourself to sweep the floor in that time limit. Similarly, if you live with other people, you can set up a scoreboard for everyone to write how many dishes they cleaned over the week, and then set up a small prize for whoever cleaned the most. While this may get competitive, it’s a way to change your mindset around cleaning from it being a labour, to it being a challenge.
One of the most important things in keeping a kitchen clean is to establish good and quick-acting habits, since messes only compound over time. When it comes to spillage or stains, especially from sauce or liquids, try to clean them as they happen, rather than leaving them for later. If sauce bubbles over and gets over the stovetop, it may seem easier to leave it to the end, for cleaning up when you’re already doing the dishes or putting away everything after cooking, but it’s far better to at least start cleaning a spill as it happens, because letting it dry will only make it that much harder to scrape off.
Cleaning is actually one of the few tasks in which doing half a job is better than doing part of a job – you can’t, for example, halfway water the plants or partially make your bed, just starting to clean a mess in the kitchen will greatly improve your ability to clean it after. A halfway-sponged countertop will have fewer dried-on messes and will be easier to finish later, so invest in starting jobs as you go, to make it easier on yourself later on.
If one of your problems is lingering kitchen smells after cooking, there are many specific solutions for each one. Whenever you cook meat of any nature, be it poultry, red meat, or seafood, make sure that you never put it in the sink afterwards dry. Always, always, always leave the cleaning equipment in soapy water if you intend on soaking rather than cleaning it immediately, since this is one of the most common causes for lingering odours in the kitchen. If you can clean the pan immediately, do so as often as possible. As another case, fish can leave a salty, even ammonia-like smell in your kitchen that can certainly overstay its welcome fast, and one of the best methods for getting rid of it is vinegar.
You can wash your hands with lemon juice to get rid of the smell lingering on your hands after cooking, leave a bowl of distilled white wine vinegar overnight to dispel the fish smell gradually, or gently simmer vinegar in a pan on the stovetop to get rid of it quickly. For trash smells that linger after it has already been taken out, make sure that you’re cleaning your trash can with soap regularly so that it does not absorb the smell of waste, and boil cinnamon sticks in water to release a spicy, clean smell that covers over nearly everything.
In essence, the best way to keep a kitchen tidy, clean, and fresh-smelling is to work smarter, not harder. Rather than punishing yourself by forcing one hard day of cleaning a week, try to disperse the tasks out each day so that you can build small daily routines that are far more manageable. Work with your habits instead of against them by trying to find the most joy and pleasure in each task, even if it means gamifying them, and clean as you go. The more pleasant experiences you establish, the easier your habits will be to maintain, and the more you’ll enjoy being in your kitchen again.
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