June 17, 2025
How to Maintain a Clean Apartment Between Maid Visits
There’s nothing like your home after a maid visit. All of the surfaces are shiny. It smells incredibly fresh and clean – you can almost forget you’re in your New York City apartment. Not a single item is out of place, and you feel fantastic about the lack of clutter. Unfortunately, unless you’re paying for a daily maid service, it can quickly become messy again, especially if you have pets and children.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be the case. If you stay on top of it, just a few minutes of cleaning a day can help keep your home tidy and make your next maid visit even more effective. Then, your maid service can spend more time doing the intensive cleaning instead of picking up a light mess.
Below, we’ll cover practical, easy-to-follow tips to help you keep your space tidy in between professional cleaning. We’ll break them down on a daily and weekly basis to help them feel more manageable. We know everyone loves a good cleaning hack that can help them maximize their time, and you’ll feel energized and ready to clean by the end of this article.
Daily Habits Between Maid Cleaning
Being more mindful of your day-to-day activities can help keep your home feeling cleaner longer. Below are four daily habits you can develop to prolong your clean.
Wiping Down Surfaces
Each room in your home has surfaces that need to be kept clean. When you’re in a room, take a few minutes to wipe them down. This can help prevent a mess from building up.
- Kitchen: Kitchens can quickly get dirty and grimy if you’re not careful. After you’ve cooked a meal, take a quick pass over surfaces to clean up any debris. This includes countertops, microwaves, kitchen stoves, and other appliances.
- Bathroom: Spray and wipe down bathroom and vanity counters. Do it every night before bed to wake up to a clean space.
- Living room/Dining Room: Wipe down any tables or entertainment centers. It will also give you the opportunity to return empty coffee cups and water bottles to the dishwasher or trash. You’ll have less clutter in the room, which is a win-win.
Regardless of what room you’re in, if you spill something, clean it up immediately. Don’t let it sit around. Not only could it attract bugs, but it will also be harder to clean once it’s dried on.
Stay on Top of Dishes
Most people dread doing the dishes, but they don’t have to be that bad. At the end of every day, load the dishwasher. If there are dishes left over, wash and dry them by hand, then put them away. When you wake up in the morning, unload your dishwasher while you drink your daily coffee.
If you don’t have a dishwasher, that’s okay. Complete your washing by hand. Put on a podcast or your favorite show to make it more enjoyable. This small routine can cut down on overloaded sinks, which can attract bugs if you’re not careful.
Manager Clutter in Open Spaces
It can be so easy to walk in the door and put everything on the counter, but resist the urge. Instead, find places for most of your common items.
- Put your shoes in a shoe rack
- Place your keys on the wall
- Hang up your coat and purse
- Sort through the mail and throw out all the junk
Your counters shouldn’t have a lot of stuff on them. That makes cleaning an arduous task rather than a quick activity. Make sure all of the items in your home have a place and that your counters aren’t overly cluttered. You’ll notice a difference quickly in how easy it is to clean.
Take Out the Trash
Make it a habit to check your trash and take it out daily if applicable. Food waste can cause your New York apartment to smell, so you’ll want to make sure to throw out the garbage routinely. Depending on how many people you have living in your home, you may only have to take out your trash a few days a week.
Regardless of the frequency, not letting the trash overflow makes it more manageable. You don’t have to worry about crushing it all in the can or hope that it won’t fall out as you are trying to handle throwing it out. No one wants to tackle the leaning tower of trash.
Weekly Tasks Between Maid Visits
Many tasks can extend to a weekly or bi-weekly cadence depending on your living space, the number of people who live in your home, and more. Consider the following cleaning activities on a weekly cadence before your next professional cleaner visit.
Vacuum High-traffic Areas
New York can be dirty, so you want to make sure to vacuum high-traffic areas to address the mess. To prevent tracking it into your home, you can take your shoes off right when you enter the door. It can help extend the time between vacuuming and keep some of the nasty germs out of your home. Who knows what you’re tracking in from the dirty streets or public transportation.
Many New Yorkers invest in robot vacuums, programming their living space so the devices can do routine sweeps. These can be helpful, but they do not take the place of a weekly deep vacuuming. Avoid them if you have pets. They can unintentionally track worse messes around your home.
Refresh Bathrooms
You should be refreshing your bathrooms on a weekly basis. In addition to wiping down counters and putting your personal items away, you should also be:
- Wiping down mirrors
- Spraying down showers and bathtubs
- Sweeping the floors
- Cleaning the toilet
If you keep the surface clean, your maid service can do the deeper cleaning on their next visit.
Wash and Fold Laundry
The frequency at which you do laundry depends on how many people you have in your home. You may want to do it daily and cover a different person each day, or complete it all over one day.
The most important part is to wash, fold, and put away the laundry on the same day. If you don’t, it will sit around and become wrinkled. Before long, you’ll forget if it was clean and wash it all over again.
How to Integrate Cleaning Into Your Routine
New Yorkers are busy, so here are some quick and easy ways to integrate cleaning into your routine.
Get Creative With Your Time
Everyone always says they don’t have enough time to clean, but that’s not always true. You can get creative with your time and identify small pockets to clean.
- Wipe down the counter as you wait for your water to boil.
- Put away clutter during a meeting you don’t have to be on camera for.
- Set a timer for 15 minutes and see what you can accomplish during that time.
It doesn’t take much if you do a little at a time.
Use Space Saving Tools
You don’t have to buy bulky cleaning tools to clean your small apartment.
- Use a small vacuum. Many double as a wet/dry vac to tackle multiple messes
- Look for items that fold up or have multiple functions
- Don’t buy more than you need
You can save space without compromising the products you need to clean.
Smart Organization Hacks
One of the best ways to keep a room clean is to keep cleaning supplies where you need them.
- Put a small caddy of items under a sink
- Use shelves to help you organize under your sink to fit more items
- Utilize over-the-door organizers to make your cleaning supplies more convenient
You are more likely to clean if you have your supplies within reach. If you have to leave the room to find something, you may keep putting off the cleaning task. What was once a small task quickly becomes a big issue.
Why Choose White Glove Cleaners
White Glove Cleaner offers customizable services, so you’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to your cleaning needs. We offer weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly packages spanning all different types of cleans. Whether you are looking for a green clean only using organic products or a deep clean to get rid of the most stubborn messes, we have you covered. We make it easy to maintain the clean between our services so you can spend more time doing what you love.