Asklemmy

Before someone visits.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Oh shit, dust exists.

If we're strictly talking dust accumulation, there's a few things you can do to reduce this.

• Make sure to change the filter in your HVAC system and intake vents every few months with a high quality filter. The better the filter, the more you need to change it.
• You can also add an air filter to individual rooms. I added them to all our bedrooms and it helps a ton with keeping dust down.

Aside from that, you'll still need to dust every so often and how often will depend on how fast it gets dirty again and how deep you want to clean. I use a vacuum and damp rag to dust shelves and such every month and I dust other things like blinds and fan blades and pull out furniture and appliances once a year. Every few years we'll need to remove something that usually never moves and we'll clean up the dust from that. I will say it's much easier to clean stuff regularly when you don't have lots of things laying around or taking up space. Keeping literal objects tidy makes it less of a chore. It's a lot easier to just wipe a table than to wipe a table and all the knick knacks.

Don't have dogs. Don't have woodburners. Don't have horses. In fact, don't live any kind of outdoorsy life if you want a dust-free home.

My home is dusty. I decided that the above was more important to me.

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 only vacuum every other week to a month.

I offset this by having air purifiers running in every room.

we've got a super tiny apartment.i clean constantly, and dust isn't much of an issue cause just about every surface sees constant use.

Kipple is unavoidable, but an air filter helps a lot more than you think.

Also if you have pets, might be worth it to get a robot vacuum. Even the 3+ year old models are still great.

Dust is just inevitable, it'll come back in one way or another. It'll make layers and it'll just be dirty all over again. The best we can do is just slow it down, but you'll still get dust from somewhere.

The way I do it is to start by dusting all the countertops, cleaning the tables, and throwing every food or dirt down on the floor, then I vacuum all the floors (tiles), moving tables, chairs, and other things around. I mop and I clean the bathroom (toilet, sink, shower) while the floor dries. Finally, I mop once more and I make a coffee to relax.

edit:I also clean the kitchen countertop, stove, coffee machine and everything else on the kitchen.

buildings are designed to be closed. its a horrible design thats irreversibly invested upon.

Usually after a while of being able to see the routes I walk in my apartment visibly, it manages to stress me to the point where I can do something about it and I'll spend a solid 10 hours cleaning and tidying

I pay for a cleaning service to come through quarterly. My partner does most of the home maintenance stuff. I'll do dishes when I cook, but she likes to handle it when she cooks and I'm ok with that because she got mad at me enough times for asking her not to do them before she moved in and they were my dishes. Otherwise, if you see a mess, clean it up. This applies to stuff that got forgotten the night before, vomit from the kitty who sometimes pukes, etc.

The quarterly deep cleaning take care of mopping the hard floors, dusting everything, whatever else.

I run my robot vacuum every day, just because it's possible and it always manages catch some amount of dust every day.

A large part of why robot vacuums are great is because they decouple basically all effort from the task, making it easy to do it frequently and hence keep up with it. The same applies for dishwashers.

Its always an ongoing thing. We clean as we go.

Shoes stay on our front door mat and don't come inside.

Fake feather dusters (or swiffer) to clean tricky stuff and under things.

Swifter the hard surfaces every other day.

Damp cloth to wipe down a surface that is showing dust.

Frying stuff means using hood extractor even if it is not visbly needed, because without it we would later find soot/dust all over certain areas that are colder like window sills ...the aerosolized oil/soot would travel and drop by convection near windows and baseboards.

Carpets are bad for trapping dust but also they are good at creating dust from broken carpet fibers. These get weekly vacuuming and twice yearly steam cleaning--the water coming out is always murky brown even though the carpet looks relatively clean.