There’s always more to learn when taking care of your home. Of course, it’s good enough that you know how to do them. Between washing dishes and maintaining household facilities and appliances, there are some things you might forget and also things you might be doing wrong. Not “wrong” necessarily, but it might be things you want to do better. Here are a few of them
Not cleaning your reusable grocery bags
Published studies have claimed that most grocery shoppers admit that they don’t wash their reusable shopping bags. Think about how these bags are always touched by different people and items each time you go grocery shopping. Cross-contamination occurs when you store wet food items like raw meats and produce in the same bag as pre-cooked items.
This is why it’s essential to learn the best way to wash your reusable bags every time you shop. Protect food items, especially leaky ones, and the bags themselves by double-bagging. Assign and label each bag you use exclusively for meat, produce, dairy, dry goods, and cleaning supplies together with bathroom essentials.
Using too much laundry detergent
This might come off as a shock to many of you, but one to two tablespoons of powder detergent is enough for each 12-pound load of laundry. It’s a common claim for detergent labels to use more than two tablespoons or even a cup, but really, too much of it can lead to too many suds, removing the friction that allows clothes to rub against each other to clean themselves. They can even catch more dirt than they already have before you wash them. If you’ve made this mistake, there is a way to get rid of detergent buildup.
Aside from the fact that it’s such wasteful to use an excessive amount, it’s terrible for the environment. In the United States alone, one billion laundry detergent jugs are being produced in a year. The plastic it usually comes in isn’t getting recycled. An average American family does about 400 loads of laundry per year. Consider all the waste that goes into landfills.
Neglecting to replace your air filter
Air duct cleaning is an essential maintenance task that you should do annually. What you can do at home is replace your filter when necessary. Your air filter serves as a protection from dust and dirt sucked into your system. This also includes the substances that can get out of the system and into your home. Ignoring to replace it can damage your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in the long run due to dust and dirt buildup, which makes it work ineffectively.
Not replacing your kitchen sponges often enough
Dishwashing soap and a kitchen sponge are two obvious essentials for washing your dishes. As it’s essential to wash kitchen tools, utensils, and even kitchen gadgets, it’s easy to overlook the germs and bacteria that stick to the sponge. You might be surprised how dirty kitchen sponges can be and how fast they can contaminate the rest of your kitchen. Therefore, you have to replace them every one to two weeks.
If you feel like it’s such a waste to replace them that often, you can reuse them for something else. You can reuse these sponges to clean your kitchen and bathroom sinks or use them to wash any other items in your home outside the kitchen.
Not loading utensils in the dishwasher properly
When it comes to loading the dishwasher, there are a lot of opinions on the best way to do it. While your plates, spoons, and forks should be OK, think about your knives. Make sure the blades are pointing down to ensure no one hurts themselves when it’s time to empty the dishwasher.
Be mindful not to load too many items in there in a hurry. If you do, there’s a chance the dishwasher can’t clean some of them as properly as the rest. You can prevent this from happening by putting some of the spoons in with the handle pointing up and some pointing down. You can also put a mix of forks and spoons in the same section. Ensure that you distribute your utensils across the dishwasher evenly.
There is no one way to run a household since everyone is different in their ways. Running and maintaining a home is a lot harder than it looks, and it can be very draining at times. This is why it’s essential to find ways to improve your home maintenance methods to work better and wiser. This way, you save a lot of time and energy as well.
