Or ways to remove that accumulation fast?
Non-vacuum cleaner tips would be more actionable for me currently, but please do share your ways.
Before someone visits.
This is the truth. The pandemic really messed up my house because we stopped cleaning when people stopped coming over, and now it is so bad that we still don’t have people coming over. Add to that having a kid who doesn’t want to ever get rid of any of her old toys, and 2 parents trying hard to not let depression win… I don’t think we’ll ever have a clean house again.
I have dust mite allergies. 2 most important changes I did were:
(1) no carpets, no curtains, only tile floors.
(2) and I love my robot vaccuum. They do 80% of the work, daily, whilst I’m away.
Do you have dust mite resistant sheet covers, that was the biggest improvement for me
- 1 for using the word whilst betwixt daily and I’m.
As someone with ADHD I actually keep a broom leaning against my standing desk and sweep to busy my hands whenever I’m thinking or on a call. Dusting/washing walls simply doesn’t happen in our household due to how many steps are involved - but for most other cleaning we build it into tasks - so as I cook I clean cookware as I go - when I finish showering I squeegee the glass, and there’s cleaning fluid within reach if I notice build up.
These are all really exploits designed to help ADHD people do shit but maybe they’ll help you!
My wife and I debate about dust. I view as perfectly natural thing that should just be let be and she argues that im an idiot. She wins those debates.
Your wife is correct
she won me over a bit but now she wants dusting done even if no dust is visible. preposterous!
cleaning it before it becomes a problem is how you keep it from becoming a problem
visible signs are not a problem though. there is nothing there yet. its like cleaning dishes that are already cleaned or folding laundry again that sitting folder already.
When I was with my ex: every saturday morning. It sucked, but the reward of both chilling on the sofa in the afterglow of a clean apartment was awesome. God I miss that.
Now: rarely. If it begins to affect my mental health, I might pick up clothing off the floor. I don’t clean for myself, I clean for the happiness of others
As @xmunk said, cleaning needs to be embedded in other tasks. If you cannot figure out how to embed a given task then you can set it for a fixed schedule. For example, you say that you clean your desk or office on Saturday morning and you have a given set of steps you accomplish.
Another trick I learned from corporate world is to delegate the tasks. It is more manageable to follow up on someone doing it for you than you actually doing it. This can be someone else living with you, or someone you can hire to do. For example, you can hire someone to clean the house every Sunday. This later option could be expensive.
If you want to embed tasks and do it yourself, then you need to make them easy for you, for example, you can overstock cleaning products. Let’s say you have a kitchen microfiber towel that hangs nearby and a dedicated cleaning product at reach. You consider that a meal (launch or dinner) equals, fetching the ingredients, cooking, eating and cleaning dishes, putting away dishes, and finally cleaning them. If you don’t clean dishes then you consider you did not finish your dinner.
Same thing for the bathroom, you need cleaning tools at reach when you are in the bathroom, don’t reuse kitchen stuff to clean the bathroom. Then when you shower, you clean the bathtub, the mirror, the sink, your underwear, wipe the floor, etc.
Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t great a cleaning, but they are very effective at keeping the dust down. You will still want to clean occasionally but with a robot vacuum running regularly you can do it much less often and the house feels cleaner in the meantime.
I’m also lucky enough to be able to afford house cleaners now. It is such a nice gift to our family to not have to worry about doing these things. We can spend that time doing stuff together rather than cleaning and we don’t think about how dirty the house is and dread cleaning it nearly as often. If you can afford it I would highly recommend it. It definitely isn’t cheap but many people have more expensive habits that bring less joy IMHO.
I’ll second the robot vacuum. Doesn’t even have to be an expensive one or a “top reviewed” blah blah(don’t get a lemon though). It’s not a replacement for a vacuum or having to clean, it’s just a nice little companion that helps out a little and reminds you that you have to clean. Don’t have one myself but a relative does and it’s fun to see (over there a lot to help out because they’re older).
If you’re into sci-fi or electronics or little animal/robot companions in games, it kinda feels exactly the same but in person. Such a strange sensation to feel joy when the little robot guy runs between your feet or you have to shoo them out of the bathroom so you can use it lol. Even my older relative kinda treats it like a pet but all you have to do is empty it’s belly.
I’m constantly cleaning. I live alone in a 100+ year old building. It’s no exaggeration to say that there’s a coating of dust moments after I get done dusting.
I use a microfiber duster for daily cleaning and a heavily diluted mixture of water, vinegar, and soap for deeper cleaning.
The only thing I can think of, but haven’t tried, to minimize dust accumulation is to run a humidifier. That should theoretically give the dust particles something to cling onto and be less prone to becoming airborne as you move about. Perhaps a daily water misting from a spray bottle could work - I should give that a try.
I have an air purifier in my bedroom. It doesn’t do very much. I don’t really understand how they’re supposed to work anyway. There’s no way it’s going to suck in dust from the other side of the room. I wonder sometimes if it actually makes things worse. I use it mostly for the white noise to sleep with.
You need a bigger air purifier. :) I have one that will definitely suck in dust from the other side of the room.
I have one that claims “Circulates the air 1x per hour in 743 square foot rooms and 4.8x per hour in 153 sq. ft rooms”. My room is 180 square feet (12x15).
The concept itself doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve got a single box that both sucks in air and blows it out. It would seem to me that this just creates vortex around the box itself with some minimal air movement in the rest of the area.
A proper air purification system would need to be part of your home’s central HVAC system where it’s been engineered to suck in the air from one side of a room, filter it through the system, then blow it back out on the other side of the room. And / or several smaller air purifiers strategically placed within a room.
I’ve done a bit of searching and surprisingly have not been able to find a rally good study. This would seem easy enough to qualify with some knowledge of fluid mechanics. I found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NinsW8f2ABk The room is about a third the size of my room and the purifier is about 50% larger. The in/out design of this device is dramatically different from mine. I have a hunch that the consumer (Amazon) air purifier market is mostly garbage.
You are correct the volume is how much air it can process and not a guarantee it will do your actual space. You definitely will get overly air cycled areas and deadzones. You may find more dust settles in certain areas now. Without ducting, one thing you could try it setting up an ossicilating fan elsewhere to try to randomly kick more air into the flow of things. By doing this it will get more dust into the air at first until it can be drawn into a filter.
I walk around the house with a swiffer mop before I take a shower. Then vaccum the carpets in the rooms once a week. Showering is usually the trigger to do some sort of maintenance cleaning in the house. My logic is that if I’m gonna get dirty, I’ll do it before I shower.
About once a week, though I live in a one bedroom apartment. Deep cleaning is about once a month.
I used to have a very large air filter standing in the corner of my room. It wouldn’t eliminate the need to vacuum, but it would reduce the dust in the air and make it less noticeable. I got rid of it because the filter cartridges were sorta discontinued/really expensive
Oh shit, dust exists.
I wipe my floor with a damp cloth/mop every two weeks or so. That removes a lot of the dust with relatively little effort.
So many things factor into this…
Our house became significantly (like 97%) less dusty when our dog passed.
The age of your house
The type of furnace filter
Routine
We have 3 small kids, so we try to tidy up physical stuff (toys, clothes, bags, etc) every day. Dishes too.
Once a week is wiping down nin-kitchen surfaces
Once a month is wiping down baseboards and door trim
I should clean more often.
But my humidifier is also an air purifier and it pulls a LOT of dirt from the air. I change the water every week and it’s filthy. Surprising how much dirt is in the air to “purify.”
Could you explain how this humidifier/air purifier works? I’ve wondered about the possibility of an air purifier that uses water rather than a “screen” but haven’t seen anything. My wife and I both have allergies, and our house gets really dry in the winter so one small appliance to deal with both issues sounds like a nice solution.
Oh it makes a huge difference. Without humidifiers I get awful dry skin and nosebleeds from the dry heat of the heaters in winter.
This humidifier is different from the vaporizers I used before. Those ones would get mouldy and would only last a year.
It’s a Venta Air washer. It has a turbine inside the water reservoir that slowly turns the water like a mill, so the water evaporates more slowly than with a vaporizer. And on top there’s a fan sucking air down into the wet churning turbine, so the air is being pushed through all the wet pieces of the turbine. Somehow that takes impurities out of the air, they stick to the water. And the impurities don’t evaporate, so as the water slowly evaporates you can see it getting dirtier over a few days.
EDIT: I have a two-bedroom apartment and the one humidifier makes the whole place comfortable. It’s a really good purchase. You have to buy a liquid to add to the water though.
I found this video that sort of explains it:
Thanks, I will definitely spend some time looking into those! I saw some information about an additive for the water, and a special cleaning solution you are supposed to use. Do you have to order those regularly to keep it clean and running well?
Actually I just get one bottle (of each) every 2 years. Even so, it’s slightly expensive, and I bet that there’s a cheaper alternative if I could find out what the ingredients are.
That’s not as bad as I was expecting, but yeah extra cost is annoying. Thanks for the info about this!
