Create a Low Maintenance Household
September 3, 2010 – 3:03 pm by MarinaHanes
Words to live by: Don’t become a slave to your home.
Housekeeping can take several painstaking hours, and it’s imperative for you and your family’s health to keep counters, floors and vents in tip-top shape. Have you ever heard of the Annoying Building Syndrome (ABS)? Well, its when you make high-maintenance decorating choices that make your life more difficult. Some people learn this after spending a large chunk of their life fussing with bad color choices and poor finishes and fabrics. Below are some tips to prevent ABS so your home stays clean — or at least clean looking.
The Right Colors
Even though you have cleaned, your house might still look dirty, and it’s possible that the color choices of certain soft fabrics such as your carpeting are the culprit. For example, pet hair, messy children and white don’t mix. Unless you’re a fairly clean and neat person to begin with, you should probably avoid a white couch for the family room. An alternative is to learn toward medium fabrics and carpeting, because light and very dark colors magnify the stains and pet hair.
The Right Types of Finishes & Fabrics
Natural fabrics are always the way to go, because you can find sustainable, organic materials, and they don’t attract dust, dirt and pet hair like synthetic ones do. The manmade materials are more apt to hold a static charge. Also, tightly woven fabrics like cotton towels and bed sheets are less likely to collect hair and other thin fibers. When it comes to the bathroom fixtures, it’s best to choose ones that have smooth light-colored finishes so they don’t show water spots, leftover toothpaste, etc.
For high traffic areas, you definitely want to consider washable wall coverings, because matte and textured paints are going to be impossible to wash. Instead of having to paint the area over again, you want to be able to easily wipe away that built up dust and grime.
Even perfectionists don’t have time to clean the house all day, but you can at least incorporate some of these elements into your humble abode so it looks like you’re Suzy Homemaker.
Tags: annoying building syndrome, low maintenance decorating, low maintenance household