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Cleaning your home is supposed to feel refreshing and rewarding. Who doesn’t love the sparkle and smell of a recently cleaned home? Sometimes, I get extremely frustrated when I spend time cleaning and scrubbing only to reveal that my house still looks dirty.
If you also experience the struggle of not seeing a clean home after you know it’s clean, here are a few reasons why it might not seem that way.
- Clutter
Even if your home is 100% germ-free, it won’t feel clean unless it’s tidy. Clutter can ruin all your efforts when it comes to a sense of cleanliness. Even if those items are all essential, they look like trash when they’re lying around.
Try to hide your clutter in closets, drawers, or baskets. When you organize these spaces, you’ll create more space to store the items that you usually keep out in the open.
- Shelves
Even though shelves are an easy way to organize your home, they can also be a source of frustration. When your shelves aren’t designed properly, they end up looking cluttered.
When you think of your shelves like displays in a shop, your home will look cleaner. Add more space between items and use shelves to show off and highlight your favorite items.
- Clean Laundry
Whether the laundry lying around is clean or dirty, it creates a mess that leads to the feeling that your home isn’t quite clean. Usually, collecting and washing dirty laundry is a part of the cleaning process—but folding laundry is easy to put off.
If you want your home to feel clean, you have to finish putting away your laundry.
- Throw Blankets
Everyone loves a good blanket. Whether or not you say I have a blanket collection or a blanket addiction is up to you, but either way, one thing holds true. If all my blankets are out, the house looks messy. Having too many throw blankets around creates clutter.
Consider storing your extra blankets in a closet or ottoman.
- Unmade Beds
Do you see a pattern emerging? Untidy things feel messy. If you want your space to feel clean, it needs to be neat. Making the bed is a quick and easy way to give yourself that sense of cleanliness in your home.
- Disorganized Shoes
If you keep your shoes at the door, they can quickly pile up into a mess that grows every day. Organizing them into neat rows of pairs will help, but the best solution is a shoe shelf.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got way too many shoes to display them all at the door. Keep your extra shoes in a nearby closet and avoid having them out all at once.
- Scuffed Walls
Homes experience normal wear and tear. Whether your two-year-old explored using crayons on the walls or moving in furniture didn’t go as smoothly as planned, the walls get marked up. Dirty fingerprints and splattering spills can also cause some unwanted marks that may be a normal part of your home—but it makes it feel dirty.
I use Mr. Clean Magic Erasers for anything that shows up on the paint in my home.
- Dings, Dents, and Holes
Sometimes our homes take more of a beating than we intend as we decorate, move, and live life. Holes, dents, and other marks that peel away paint will make your home feel dirty.
If you’ve never spackled before, it’s not as hard as it seems. Just get a drywall repair kit, fill those holes, and paint over it.
- Stained Grout
If you feel like your tile always looks dirty, you might be dealing with stained grout. Consider trying this trick. Mix two parts baking soda and one part water into a paste. Apply it to all the grout or just the trouble areas, and let it sit overnight (or for a day if you’ve got two bathrooms in your home). Then, give the grout a good scrub and rinse it with hot water.
If you’d rather start fresh, you could use a grout restoring product like this grout pen to recolor the space between your tiles.
- 10. Weathered Caulk
Sometimes, no matter how hard I clean, places like baseboards and bathtubs still feel dirty. It’s the caulk. This filler should be replaced every five years, and it’s one of the most neglected aspects of older homes. Old caulk doesn’t just look bad. It can affect the insulation in your home and result in higher energy bills.
Luckily, you don’t need to call someone to re-caulk your home. You can purchase caulk online and do it yourself.
- 11. Cloudy Windows
Windows aren’t always the easiest things to clean. Getting the outside (or the overlapping panes) can be a struggle, but it will make a world of difference.
Don’t forget to clean your windows. Their sparkle and sheen will make your home feel clean and pristine!
- 12. Neglected Containers
When you clean the bathroom or kitchen sink, do you wipe down the soap bottles? Like a dirty mirror with toothpaste spit on it, splattered bottles make your home feel unclean.
Make cleaning soap containers (and anything else that gets splattered by the sink or shower) a habit.
- 13. Dirty Dishes
Whether your dirty dishes are strewn about your home or piled up in the sink, they’ll make your house feel dirty after you’ve cleaned.
Even if you don’t have the energy to wash everything, consider moving them into the dishwasher or organizing them, so the pile doesn’t seem so massive.
- 14. Soiled Spaces
Do you have stained couches, carpets, or blankets? Even though stains are a part of life, you don’t have to accept them forever.
Consider using a stain-remover on fabrics. When all else fails, you could cover up your carpet with an area rug or your couch with a (neatly folded) throw blanket.
- 15. Dusty Corners
When you clean, how low do you go? I mean, do you get down on the ground and look at the places you never see? Even if it’s not on your conscious radar, dirty and dusty forgotten corners can make your home feel dirty.
An easy solution is to be more mindful when cleaning your home. Scan the room from top to bottom and consider cleaning everything.
Why Your Home Still Feels Dirty After You Clean
There you have it. These are the 15 most likely reasons that your home still feels dirty right after you clean it. Next time you clean, think about how you can apply some of these tips and tricks. Pay attention to the details because they make your home sparkle.
This is a list of some of the items I use in my house to clean, which are affordable as well. They all make cleaning much easier for me and even faster. I recommend you use these. List of affiliate links below.
To Use Less Liquid Soap
Clean Your Floors Faster
Clean The Walls In Your House Easier
For Cleaning Windows Or Stains Off Wall
To Clean Your Sofa, Car Seat, Bed ETC
To Use With Product Below
To Clean And Polish Furniture, Grout Joint, Toilet, Car
Also a page of Everything Household Products I normally search for