Student Apartment-Cleaning Made Manageable

By Julia Dunn on November 6, 2016

When students move into their first apartment, the task of cleaning the place may become more and more daunting over the first few weeks (or months) of living in an off-campus space. It’s different from living on campus because, comparatively, off-campus apartments are much larger than the tiny one-third of a dorm room you had to worry about in a triple dorm room.

Thus, there is physically more space for you to keep clean.

Image via Pixabay

Plus, instead of having a community bathroom that was just for your residence hall floor on campus, you now have your own bathroom (which does not come with the same janitors who graciously cleaned your old residence hall bathrooms).

As students with limited free time and limited energy for cleaning up an apartment, how do you optimize the process without letting entropy take over at home?

Here are five ways to keep messes under control and to minimize the amount of time you need to spend cleaning your place:

1. Wash dishes as soon as you finish eating.

It’s easy to just add your dinner dishes to the sink and hop on into bed to work on your essay. However, it’s equally easy to take the 60 seconds or so to wash off your plate right after you finish eating and add it to your drying rack!

When students pile up a bunch of bowls, cups and plates into the sink (creating a dish-sculpture that could crash down atop your counter at any second), the chore of doing dishes becomes more and more irritating. If you can coax yourself to get into the habit of washing the one or two dishes you use in the moment, your sink will stay clear and you won’t have to spend 20 minutes at the end of the week scrubbing salsa and scrambled egg remnants off of your dishes.

Do yourself a favor and get dishes washed as soon as you can after you finish a meal!

2. Do laundry well before you actually need the clothes.

Are you one of those people who waits until Sunday night to do laundry for the school week?

If you live in an apartment complex that has a community laundry room, you probably know that Sunday night is laundry night for many residents, and it’s a struggle to get a washing machine and dryer when competing with others who also put off their laundry for Sunday night.

To avoid the Sunday evening laundry rush, consider doing your laundry at a time when most folks aren’t in the laundry room: Friday night or Saturday morning.

Waiting until Sunday night puts you at risk of not getting a washer and dryer right when you want them, and you may have to wear dirty clothes Monday morning if this happens to you!

3. Buy a toilet bowl cleaning brush.

Trust me, no student wants to spend their hard-earned money on a plastic brush that’s just going to scrub away gunk in your toilet. But you need one. You really, really need one.

4. Invest in a vacuum.

Typically, students might think of vacuums as expensive — and they are, compared to some of the other apartment-cleaning supplies you may buy — but the need for a vacuum in a college student’s apartment is quite high. No student wants to lay down and do homework on a dusty carpet or walk barefoot across the kitchen floor at night for a snack.

Image via Pixabay

Some vacuums can be found on sale for around $20, a much better deal than those $60-70 ones. If you really don’t want to buy a new one, check out “free and for sale” Facebook pages or check to see if any friends who live close to you might let you borrow theirs on a regular basis.

5. Create an actual cleaning schedule.

If you don’t have a set time in your calendar designated for cleaning your apartment, you should. Otherwise, you probably won’t do it.

Students are so invested in their calendars that many of us follow our schedules down to the minute (at least, we try to do so). Blocking out an hour or two every so often for cleaning will increase the chances that you’ll actually clean! You can make it fun — put on music, a TV show on your laptop, or invite a friend over who can keep you company (or even help you, if they’re feeling generous).

If you live with housemates, find a time when most or all of you are free, and turn apartment-cleaning into a competition: who can clean the most in one hour? Maybe you can go out for ice cream afterwards. You’ll return home to a livable apartment that feels better than it used to, and this can even enhance your productivity once you crack down on your homework. Sadly, just because you’re a student doesn’t mean your apartment will clean itself.

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