Uncategorized Archives - Page 7 of 15 - Illinois Valley House Cleaning Services

Schedule A Winter Cleaning Before It Gets Cold

November 2, 2017 by Illinois Valley Clean Team

winter home cleaning in Peru It’s getting colder and when the snow falls, everyone craves the warmth and comfort of their home. The days of frolicking outside are over and traded in for indoor craft time and catching up on all those TV shows you missed. It’s also the perfect time to schedule a home cleaning to get everything spruced up before hibernating for the winter.

Deep Cleaning Makes the Winter Easier

The winter doldrums make doing anything a chore. The weather is frigid and the sun retreats in fear it will be swallowed by the endless snowfall. Your home becomes your everything. You don’t want to spend the next four months spending all your time cleaning up messes and tidying up, but never feeling like you’re truly done.

Letting Illinois Valley Clean Team Inc. do a deep cleaning in your home gets the worst part out of the way. There’s no major cleaning left to do and you can focus on the little things through the winter month. Your house will look great and you can spend the winter comfortable and feeling accomplished. If it does get overwhelming, you can always call us for some more cleaning.

People Track in Everything

When people in your home go out, they never come back alone. They come back with wet shoes that track in mud and who knows what else. It can get on your floors, carpets, furniture and some places that you can’t even understand how it got there. We can help you head it off at the pass by doing a deep clean that makes your house immaculate and then following up periodically to make sure it stays sparkling clean no matter how many times Uncle Vinnie forgets to wipe his shoes.

Holiday, Holidays, Holidays

Along with snow and ice, winter brings the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Many people host parties that have relatives from all over the country visit and experience the joys of the holidays season…and your home. Hosting a party is stressful enough, and the last thing you need to worry about is cleaning your house. We can take care of that for you, so you can focus on dinner, guest lists and making sure Cousin Susie doesn’t eat the shellfish.

IVCT Inc. is the Illinois Valley’s choice for home cleaning. We’re here for you rain or shine, so contact us today and schedule your winter home cleaning before Jack Frost comes knocking on your door.

Save Some Time and Stress With Meal Planning

October 26, 2017 by Illinois Valley Clean Team

meal planning How many people suffer from dinner stress? You’re at home or work and realize it’s only a few hours before dinner needs to be ready, and you have no idea what to do. Don’t let dinner add any more stress to your day. All you need to do is plan ahead, and dinner stress will be a thing of the past.

Develop a Meal Plan Calendar

Planning begins not with the meals, but the plan for the plan. You need to decide what days will be for sitting down and developing a meal plan for the week and a day for grocery shopping. This helps determine how the rest of the week will roll out. For example, let’s say Saturday is meal plan day. It’s the weekend, and you might have the time to get everything done. Sunday would naturally be the grocery shopping day because you can go to the store and create a list based on the items you’ll need for the week.

You’ll need some way to keep track of your plan. You can have a journal or calendar that you can write the meals on. Ideally, you’ll use something magnetic that you can post on or near the refrigerator in the kitchen for easy reference.

Your meal planning day is also a perfect time to clean out the fridge and freezer to make room for the next day’s groceries.

Make Meal Prep as Easy as Possible

No one has time to create a massive meal every day from scratch. Just because you don’t have a lot of time, doesn’t mean you need to eat out or grab quick unhealthy meals. Crockpot meals and freezer meals are a great way to get healthy fresh meals without all the prep and hassle.

Crock pot meals are set and forget, and cook throughout the day. You put the ingredients in the pot and it’s done just in time for dinner. Crock pot meals are great for roasts, soups and many other items. You can find recipes for crock pot versions of just about everything.

Freezer meals require prep work, but can be frozen and cooked at your leisure. If you want to do freezer meals, then choose a day, likely during the weekend when you have more flexibility, to create several different meals, store them and freeze. During the week, you just need to pop it in the oven or stovetop and dinner is ready on time.

Give Yourself a Day

With meal prep, planning and all the usual crazy things that happen during the week, give yourself a day or two to relax. When you create your plan, make one day a leftover day and the next a day to eat out. The day you plan for the following week is a great time to eat out. Consider it a reward being awesome.

If you need any help with getting your house cleaned during your busy week, then contact us and we’ll give you even more time for what’s important.

Top 5 Cleaning Distractions To Avoid

September 11, 2017 by Illinois Valley Clean Team

top 5 cleaning distractions Let’s face it, there are very few people who wake up and say “Yeah, I get to clean the house today. Whoohoo!” Those that do, usually end up in our line of work. Given cleaning can be more of a chore than a fun pastime, it’s easy to get distracted throughout the day. The best thing to do is avoid these pitfalls entirely, so here is an examination of the biggest distractions that can happen when you’re cleaning.

Social Media

If there is one societal distraction, it’s social media. It can be Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or any of the many others available these days. The reason they’re so distracting is because you think you’re going there for only a few minutes and next thing you know two hours have gone by and you’re knee deep in cat videos.

The easiest way to eliminate this distraction is to not go on them. Silence your phone and stay off the computer until you’re done. If you scheduled yourself reward time, visit them then, but stick to your time budget.

Television Shows

In today’s world, we’re not limited to just the television in the living room. We can watch our favorite shows streaming on television, computers, phone and tablets. You can be anywhere and watch the season of Arrow you didn’t have a chance to watch. The worst part isn’t the opportunity to watch, but the duration. Movies last an hour and a half minimum and most television shows are 45-minutes to an hour.

Nothing derails cleaning faster than binge watching. The best thing to do is stay away and put that phone on silent so Netflix can’t send you notifications.

Friends

We love our friends. They deserve to be more important than cleaning, but unless they’re going through a crisis or an emergency, you should get the work done first. We love it when out bestie texts us that it’s Starbucks time or they’re heading to Target and ask if you want to go, but cleaning doesn’t do itself…unless you call us.

When friends call or text, politely tell them what you’re doing and ask to reschedule. Do it in the afternoon or clean in the early morning.

Children

Children are a blessing in every way, but they can make things difficult. Toddlers and babies always take priority, that’s a given, but if you’ve got older children, then get them involved. Want to cut down on them asking a million questions or asking for everything while you’re trying to get things done? Tell them to go clean their room or give them specific tasks like picking up the clothes or doing dishes. The cleaning will get done faster and you eliminate a distraction.

Online Shopping

Online shopping these days is a lot like social media. With apps like Amazon and Wish, you can literally sit for hours and peruse cool, weird and unique products. You may think you’re going there to check out prices for a new toaster and end up 45 minutes later looking at steampunk Christmas lights.

It’s best to wait until after cleaning to look at these apps or at the very least set a timer and stick to it.

If you get distracted easily or need someone to come clean your home to you can go shopping, then contact the area’s leading home cleaning service, Illinois Valley Clean Team Inc. Call for a free quote today.

Laundry is Backed Up? Wash It Efficiently

August 18, 2017 by Illinois Valley Clean Team

Doing laundry efficiently It happens to the best of us. Life and work become overwhelming and you keep telling yourself you’ll get to that ever-growing laundry pile tomorrow. Pretty soon, you’re driving around town in Winnie the Pooh pants and a T-shirt you haven’t worn since there was a Bush in the White House. It can be intimidating to see that massive pile of laundry and try to figure out how you’re going to get it all clean. All you need is a plan and you’ll be back in your favorite clothes in no time.

Separate Into Different Baskets

A mound is daunting. No one looks at a mountain and says, “Yeah, that’s easy to climb.” Grab as many baskets as you can and separate all the clothes by person and use. Separating the baskets by person makes it easier to fold and manage everything once it’s clean. You should also separate out by use, for example, bedding in one basket and dish towels and wash towels in another. The act not only makes it easier to eventually fold, but also makes it look less daunting. You have a quantifiable amount instead of a massive laundry mound that may or may not be harboring evil demons (depends on how long the socks have been in there)

Wash By Basket, Not By Load

You might be able to fit both your child’s basket and your spouse’s into the washing machine, but that can make things confusing. Efficiency is about more than just time, it’s also about action. If you put in more than one person’s basket, then when you dry it and fold, you’re once again sorting not only by clothing, but by person. When you go to put them away, you might be going back and forth or rummaging through to find what clothes go with what person.

Make a Plan for the Future

The best way to avoid a massive laundry glut is to keep ahead of it. Make a plan to do one load of laundry per day and keep the laundry mountain from forming. If you miss a day, then do two loads that day. The goal is to keep up with the laundry so it doesn’t get overwhelming. It’s time to put those Winnie the Pooh pants back in the closet where it belongs.

If you’re looking for someone to spruce up your home, then contact IV Clean Team. We’ll get your home looking great.

What Is Decluttering And How Do I Do It?

August 4, 2017 by Illinois Valley Clean Team

Decluttering your home What do you see when you look at your house? Is it perfect or do you see clutter and items you don’t need everywhere you look. There have been many books and news articles about the concept of decluttering not only your home, but your life. They both tend to go hand to hand, but many people don’t understand what decluttering actually is how they can do it.

What is Decluttering?

At its very core, decluttering is about taking something complex and cumbersome and simplifying it down. We live in a society of things. People believe the more things they have the better off they are. A home filled with furniture and things is better than a home without it if the minds of many people. Unfortunately, more things often fill up too much space and can be a serious detriment to your décor and how you feel about your home.

Decluttering Your Home

Everything starts by taking a look at your home and take an inventory of what you’ve got. How much of it works with the décor you want and how much of it is just stuff that’s accumulated through the years. We all do it. We get some strange attachment to that end table we got at the Goodwill when we were a sophomore in college. It’s worn and falling apart, but every time we moved, it came with us.

Much of the things we own have memories associated both good and bad. We just can’t seem to get rid of it, but decluttering it about cleaning house and cleaning out your past too. If there are things in your home that don’t add anything to it, then they should probably go. I’m not saying to throw out everything. It’s fine to keep items of particular sentimentality or importance to you, but many of us overestimate how much we really care about them.

You’ll be surprised how good you feel once everything is out and your rooms have much space and everything works together.

Decluttering Your Life

The concept of decluttering your life isn’t much different than cleaning your home. It’s about decreasing the complexity and instead focusing on what’s important to you. We all have those friends that are toxic. They live for drama or they leech off everyone. They’re like that old falling apart table from college. You have some good and bad memories associated with it, but when it comes right down to it, it just doesn’t fit in your life right now.

Decluttering isn’t easy. It means parting with things that you’ve had for a long time that are taking up space, but doing nothing for your life. Once your house is decluttered, you’ll probably need a deep clean and Illinois Valley Clean Team Inc. can help.

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