How to design a low-maintenance house?
Photo by Allie Smith from Pexels
There’s no way around it – you have to do your chores. Keeping the house clean is essential if you want to live in a comfortable environment. It’s a dirty and unforgiving job, but someone has to do it. While you can’t get rid of chores entirely, you can significantly mitigate them with your design choices. If you don’t want to spend your whole weekend cleaning the home, you should make some big changes.
Leather furniture
The material you use for furniture will make all the difference when you get to cleaning. Spilling wine on the cloth is going to end up being a really difficult cleaning job if you can even get the stain out at all. If your kids get clumsy with things that leave a stain, you need some easy-clean materials on your side.
Leather is one of the better options you can get for your couches and armchairs. Any spill is easily wiped off with a piece of cloth or a paper towel. You don’t even have to worry about it getting in-between the cushions.
Wipeable paint jobs
A high-quality paint job will leave your walls looking like a million dollars. However, even those walls will eventually get smudges and imperfections. Perhaps you bump into the wall while moving furniture or you touch it after preparing oily food. Either way, a blemished wall isn’t the best look for a home. Worse yet, you can’t clean smudges without ruining the paint job and making it look even worse.
Luckily, this has become a common enough problem that it’s starting to change. Paint companies have designed wall paints that can be cleaned without causing the colour to smudge or fade away. As long as you stick to using water, this paint will allow you to clean without worry.
Ample storage
A cluttered home is just as unsightly as a dirty one. Over time, you’ll probably see a buildup of clutter in your home. Whenever you buy something new, you eventually run out of space to keep it. This is especially noticeable with shoes. If you don’t have adequate storage, they’ll clutter up your entrance before you know it.
Always make some extra storage space, even before you need it. You can never account for all the things that will take up space in your home, so it’s best to stay on the safe side of things and make some more room.
No room for dust
Every piece of furniture will have dust settle on top of it. This is an unfortunate reality that you’ll be reminded of every couple of weeks when you have to balance yourself on a chair and clean the cabinets in your kitchen and bedroom. There is a loophole around this, though. What if there were no “top” part of the cabinet?
You don’t have to clean the space between the top and the ceiling if the furniture reaches the ceiling. With a tight enough fit, you can avoid dust settling entirely. Combine this with a tight fit close to the wall and you can be sure that you’ll cut your cleaning times by a significant amount of time.
A compact design for toilet
Toilets are generally easy to clean around. You shouldn’t have much problem with any kind of porcelain. However, a lot of toilet designs leave a small gap between the wall and the bowl itself. This spot often ends up being a magnet for dirt and grime.
The spot is usually too small for any kind of thorough cleaning with a duster. It’s all difficult to reach. Because of this, getting a bowl or porcelain cover that reaches the wall is highly recommended.
Convenient laundry chutes
Taking care of laundry is one part adding the right ingredients and two parts finding the motivation to carry the basket all over your home. It’s even harder if your home has more than one floor. You might get a workout out of carrying the basket, but it’s not going to be a fun part of your chore routine.
Why not turn the multiple floors of your home into an advantage? By installing a couple of laundry chutes, you can make getting the laundry to the washer into a pretty simple task. Just throw it down the chute and take care of it later.
Clean kitchen floors
Kitchens are notorious as magnets for dirt and stains. With all the cooking and serving of food going on in there, it’s no wonder that they’re the most demanding rooms of most homes. Kitchen floors get especially dirty after a while, which is why cleaning them is such a chore.
Most of the dirt comes from spillage when you’re cooking up a hearty meal. If you make use of a couple of rubber floor tiles while you’re in the middle of a busy cooking session, you can avoid much of the stains and grime buildup. The rubber tiles absorb the dirt, which is then easily washed off and they can be reused. This makes the clean up a lot quicker and more efficient. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about slipping in the kitchen.
Fewer protrusions
When doing a thorough wipe down of cabinets and storage spaces, you probably spend most of the time taking care of the protrusions and ornamental parts of the design. They might look good with old-timey and midcentury home designs, but they’re a real pain to keep clean. You shouldn’t spend hours getting into every artificial nook and cranny between the handles of the cabinet doors.
Instead of dealing with these grime and dust magnets, you should opt for a simpler design that will be easier to take care of. A contemporary look with flat, even surfaces and simple handles will make cleaning a breeze.
Conclusion
Taking care of your home might be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. Creating a low-maintenance home is a relatively easy task that can be achieved with some small, but significant changes. Applying any of these ideas will cut back on your cleaning time and leave more room for spending time with your family.
Author BIO
Emma Williams is an Australian writer with a master‘s degree in business administration, who has a passion for anything lifestyle and design related. She spends most of her time redecorating and participating in house projects. As a great nature lover, her biggest pleasure is spending time in a small cottage by the river.
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