Neat Obsessions' Guide To Your New Year Cleaning Festival

Every year, we think about what new resolution we want to stick to. Maybe this year we’ll eat better, become more active, or pursue that hobby we’ve been putting off for so long.

But what about creating a New Year’s resolution for our own home?

If there’s one thing that the pandemic taught is, it’s that we should love and take care our own homes. After spending months locked up, many of us suddenly found fulfillment in cleaning, organizing, and beautifying our homes—something many of us took for granted before. But now, let us take this lesson and reminder well into the next years. That a clean and organized home is essential for a happy and healthy family.

Neat Obsessions is one of our favorite and go-to brands for anything related to homemaking. Behind the brand is Issa Reyes, a professional organizer and certified KonMari consultant-in-training, who shares her love for cleaning and organizing through Neat Obsessions’ Instagram page.

Metro.style talks to her to get some pro tips on how you can efficiently, easily, and practically clean and organize your home for a fresh new start this 2022.

This series is a 3-part series on cleaning and organizing your home to start 2021 on a positive and productive note. This is part 1 of the series.

Start 2022 with a Cleaning Festival

What exactly is a “Cleaning Festival?” We first heard this term from Issa, when she talks about the importance of regular house cleaning. It’s a nice way to pertain to “general cleaning” in a way that’s not too imposing and kind of actually sounds a bit fun to do.

“It was a term coined by my trainer in the Konmari Consultancy Training,” Issa shares. “It’s basically assigning a schedule and committing to it for cleaning your house.”

So basically, a Cleaning Festival is not just something that you want to do once a year. It’s a mindset that you get into so that you’re motivated to clean your home regularly to keep too much dirt and clutter from building up.

When preparing for a Cleaning Festival, Issa reminds us to not just prepare cleaning tools like brooms, mops, vacuum cleaners, rags, and cleaning agents. She emphasizes: “Above all these, when you really want to clean your house and maintain its cleanliness, you need readiness and commitment.”

Don’t do it just because. Do it for yourself, do it for your family’s health and safety, and do it for your home. And when you start associating the good benefits of a clean and organized home with a happy and healthy family, you’ll feel more incentivized and motivated to keep the home in tip top shape all the time—so that the Cleaning Festival becomes a regular routine for the family.

Cleaning Festival Tips

Cleaning vs organizing

Issa always delineates the difference between these two things. She says: “Cleaning is dusting off, wiping, and disinfecting surfaces, while organizing is sorting, categorizing, and putting order in your home. In other words, your house may be clean but not necessarily organized, or your things are organized but the surfaces are not clean. The best thing to have is a clean and organized house.”

This is why cleaning is a major part of Issa’s advocacy, even though she is a professional organizer. We get lured into the hype of organizing bins and boxes, and beautifully folded clothes arranged by color in our cabinets. But maintaining a healthy home is more than just that. Issa emphasizes that a clean home should be at the core of every home. So before you start purchasing those aesthetic organizing boxes, make sure that the cabinets and shelves you will use are thoroughly cleaned first. Dust up, vacuum, wipe it all up.

Should you clean the whole house?

“Although tiring, it is possible to clean the whole house in one day,” Issa says. While of course, that varies greatly on how huge your home is and how small your household is (less family members, less people helping in the cleaning), cleaning up the whole home becomes so much easier if you’ve managed to stick to your Cleaning Festival schedule throughout the year.

Just imagine, if you create a schedule where you dust up every weekend, thoroughly clean a room every month, and clean the whole home every quarter, you will find yourself doing less and less cleaning and organizing work every time because dust and clutter won’t have the chance to build up.

When it comes to crucial areas of the home, Issa highlights the need to pay extra attention to the bathroom and kitchen: “The most crucial areas to clean are the bathroom and the kitchen, since these areas are prone to germs and bacteria. Also, the kitchen is the area where we prepare our food so it is very important to be clean and hygienic in this area. The bathroom is the place where we clean our bodies, so it just makes sense that the bathroom is also clean.”

She also adds that high-touch areas are very important to clean now, especially since the risk of COVID-19 is surging: “Now that we are still in a pandemic, it’s a must to clean and disinfect our doorknobs and entryways, and allot a specific area in the house where we can clean and sanitize all things which are coming from outside the house such as grocery items.”

Make cleaning a routine

One of Issa’s most important tip when it comes to cleaning and organizing the home is to commit to it and do it regularly.

“If you find cleaning the entire house burdensome, then clean an area for just 5 minutes a day, or depending on the time your schedule will permit. For example, make your bed upon waking up, clean the bathroom sink after brushing your teeth, or immediately wash your cup after finishing your coffee. This way, cleaning becomes less stressful and less burdensome compared to a general cleaning which is less frequent but more exhausting.”

Cleaning must-haves

Different households have different needs, so it’s very important to know what your home needs before every Cleaning Festival.

In Issa’s home, she says, “My kids are asthmatic, so I make it a point to use all-natural cleaning products.” Sticking to all-natural cleaning products are not just for families with asthmatic or allergy-prone members, but it’s also a good exercise to protect your body and the environment since many toxic cleaning chemicals contribute to the degradation of our waters.

Here are some of Issa’s most trusted cleaning tools:

Kurin ionized water

Kurin is a versatile cleaning product made from the Japanese innovation of super ionized water. It’s made with high alkaline pure water with pH of around 12-13.1, so it’s essentially nearly 100% water, making it very gentle on surfaces and human skin.

If you’re thinking how it can effectively clean, sanitize, and degrease, Kurin explains on its website: “Kurin is water with small water molecules that can penetrate faster into the dirt and break it down. It also can penetrate faster into the space between the dirt and the object surface causing separation of the dirt from the object surface. When the surfaces of the two particles of dirt are covered with negative ions, they tend to repel from each other and caused separation.”

Most importantly, Kurin is safe on humans, safe for pets, and safe on the environment. This is why it is now a favorite of many homemakers like Issa who need a gentle but powerful cleaning agent for the home.

Thieves cleaning products

A proprietary line under the Young Living brand, Thieves cleaning products are all-natural household products infused with essential oils for a naturally derived, effective alternative to traditional cleaning products. You’ll find essential oils like lemongrass, orange, and bergamot, infused in Thieves cleaning agents, so they’re not just mild and gentle, but also smell amazing.

Thieves has dishwashing soap, fruit and veggie soak, all-around household cleaner, laundry detergent, and portable wipes and spray.

Hokage Mom by Ninja Made

For eco-friendly cleaning towels, check out the Hokage Mom Hokage Cleaning Cloth, an anti-microbial microfiber cloth made with their signature waffle weave. They’re made to capture dust and trap liquid 4x better than regular towels, perfect for wiping plates, furnitures, appliances, cabinets, mirrors, and any type of surface. If you get the bundle, all towels are also labeled to avoid cross contamination.

Effective cleaning and organizing are routines that families and homemakers should learn to incorporate into their lives. But of course, everyone has their own circumstances and needs.

If you need extra help in turning your home into the best version that it can be, you can always go to Neat Obsessions to avail of her online consultation and in-house services so you can jumpstart your year with a newly cleaned and organized home. She also published a book last year titled Neat Obsessions: Starting Your Journey to Organizing, Productivity, and Happiness to inspire more people to fall in love with homemaking.

Get inspired to start your year off with spick and span rooms.  Look at these home corners organized by Neat Obsessions!

For more information about her services, check out Neat Obsessions on Instagram or visit their website at neatobsessions.com.  You can also order the book directly from Neat Obsessions on Instagram @neatbosessions, or through ABS-CBN Books on Lazada and Shopee.