My tip is, make a distinction between messes that will attract insects and bacteria, which produce odors and are unhealthy, and those that don’t. A pile of books or will typically not produce an unpleasant odor for a very long time. A pile of food, whole different story. Foods and wet stuff are the primary source of smells and germs in a house, so keep your house dry and food free, which primarily means keeping your kitchen (foods and wet stuff) and bathroom (wet stuff and post-consumer food) clean as first priority. Other stuff may be psychologically stressful to some, but it typically won’t cause disease or make your place smell bad.
This works pretty well. If I wipe down the counters and stove EVERY DAY, I just need a bit of spray and a paper towel. If I let the stuff build up, then cleaning will take much, much longer.
We currently have four or five servings of lasagna in the freezer, along with one serving of spaghetti sauce. Next time I make a meatloaf, I’ll make at least two…they freeze well, and it’s pretty easy to make up a couple of sides.
I put on my music and just try to concentrate on all the good benefits that cleaning provides. I’m getting exercise and a clean pleasant smelling place. I take a moment to savor each room after it’s clean and at the end of the chore, I have a great sense of accomplishment. That feels good.
There are people who change towels after every use?!
Regarding clutter, I used to have that problem, especially with incoming mail. I learned to deal with it by either putting it in the recycle pile, or putting the bank statements and such in individual labeled file folders in a file drawer. (Now I download bank and other statements from the websites in PDF format and store them in individual folders on my computer. I don’t even get most statements in paper format.)
Basically, the idea is that if everything has a place it belongs, it’s easier to return it to that place after using it or after receiving it.
I did this and took it even further, typically cooking things in gigantic batches of 8-12 servings. Eat one right away, toss three in the fridge for later in the week, and freeze the rest in single-portion size freezer bags. If you do this, say, once every weekend, you can build up a good variety of tasty microwaveable food to eat during the week. That way you concentrate most of the week’s cooking and cleaning into one free day.
Any sort of soup, stew, or casserole will work pretty well for this strategy, and decent recipes for those sort of things are nearly fool-proof. I recall having a freezer stuffed with one quart bags of green chile and pork stew, three bean chili, and spinach lasagna.
The rest of my diet consisted of take out, ramen, sandwiches, and easy to cook meals like pasta. Boil a pound of spaghetti, toss some italian sausages in a pan, and microwave some broccoli, and open up a jar of pasta sauce, and you have a reasonable meal with leftovers in about 45 minutes including cleanup.
It works, but to really punch it up a notch, slice a lemon in half and toss it in there as well. The essential oils from the lemon rind will help to break up the grease, and leave it smelling like a bachelor doesn’t live here. 
They sell plate covers for the microwaveto prevent splatter. Well, splatter still happens, but the plate cover is much easier to clean than the microwave.
I’ve got a couple of batch meals that have become consanguineous. I realized once that my pasta sauce and my chili share a whole lot of ingredients, and both need a good long simmer. So now I chop a shit ton of onions and garlic and brown them with ground pork and beef. Then that gets divided into two pots and the rest of the ingredients added for each dish. It’s just as easy to stir two pots once in a while for a Sunday afternoon as it is to stir one, and there’s only a single extra pot and spoon, instead of an extra cutting board and knife and measuring spoons and measuring cups.
One of my guilty pleasures is Disco and house cleaning. In my defense, if I’m not house cleaning, I ain’t listening to no damn disco.
Don’t leave messes in the first place, so you won’t have anything to clean up later. Microwave all your dinners. Use paper plates/bowls and plastic forks/spoons.
And if they do a good job, will you tip them two bits?
Seriously, a maid service once a month for an apartment would probably be around $75 a time. $10 is insulting, but if you don’t like to clean, it is like taking a mini-vacation to come home and see everything (esp. your kitchen and bathroom) vacuumed, scrubbed, and cleaned. Most maids, however, won’t do dishes or organize the crap you leave strewn about.
As far as cleaning, it starts with putting your shit away when you’re done with it. Don’t come home and drop your stuff all over the living room: put your jacket in the closet, put your shopping away where you intend to store it, take boxes or packing material to the trash immediately instead of laying it in a corner somewhere.
Lets say you were a total slob, you didnt wash a single dish, throw all your trash on the floor, did not empty ash trays, dirty clothes on the floor in all rooms, missed the toilet when you pee, counter and floor in kitchen had crumbs and spills etc.
With a 1 bedroom bachelor apt you could have the whole mess cleaned up in the time it took you to do your laundry. Easily.
I find it easier to clean with someone than alone. The problem is finding/convincing someone to clean with me.
This is my vote also - I always say, it’s called house-“keeping” for a reason. Get it clean, then keep it that way.
But the key to this is after it’s clean - don’t be a slob.
You want someone to do a deep cleaning of your apt for 40 bucks?
When I was a child, one of my ambitions was for grown-up me to do as little housework as possible.
I also (rightly) promised my mother I would keep my house clean.
I have been a bachelor house-owner for 25 years.
My house is clean and the only thing I do is put stuff in the dishwasher, use and put stuff away. (10 minutes a week, tops.)
My solution is straightforward:
- cleaning lady
- laundry services
P.S. You can see how much spare time I have by my number of posts here…
This is what I do. I am stuck in the apartment doing laundry for 2 or 3 loads a week. So, I do some deep cleaning task while it’s going.
Though I do help myself along:
- When you do dishes, wipe all the surfaces in the kitchen. Then you never need to ‘clean’ the kitchen, just sweep/mop the floors.
- Put things away. If things don’t have an ‘away’ location where they belong you need to create/obtain one.
- Decide on a cleaning schedule and write down when you last did it. If the floors need it be mopped every two weeks, you will know when it is overdue.
IMHO clutter is harder to deal with than dirt. The clutter hides the dirt but you know it’s under there. So my advice is put everything away. Sort mail over the garbage/recycle bin. Put dirty clothes in the hamper. Don’t use your dining/kitchen table as a catch-all. Put away clean dishes. If you have to have stuff out, keep it in stacks. A stack of books or DVDs looks more orderly than books or DVDs strewn around the room. Keep the floor and other flat surfaces tidy.
Whew. I thought it was just going to be me.
My house is clean (except maybe for the kid’s rooms on a day-to-day basis.
My advice, maid, cook. Have both in weekly and try to maintain a non-complete slob level of tidyness during the in-between. And a good cook can prepare meals that just need heating when you’re ready to go. My freezer is sometimes filled with tasty meals.
Clutter is my weakness, I have several things going on at once and I use my house as a workshop man cave but don’t sleep here. I just hang here all day everyday. My kitchen table is a workbench and collects a ton of tools and bits of things I am working on, I lean things against the walls that I am working on and lay things on the bed. By the end of the week I have a real mess. Today was housekeeping day. It took me 30 min to put everything away and now I am getting ready to clean which might take me an hour at the most. It just aint that bad, my floors are covered with wood shavings and sawdust at the moment. Sometimes I will go 6 months inbetween major garage clean ups and that can take me a good 4 hours mostly sorting hardware and tools and putting them back in thier place.
On the cooking side, long before “wraps” got popular, I learned to put almost every meal in a tortilla. Picked this up in the Boys Scouts, because KP duty on a campout sucks. I can eat well, never use a plate, never use silverware (I assume you don’t have a dishwasher).
For cleaning, I pay someone. I have a 4 bedroom house, I pay $100 to get the whole house cleaned.