DRMacIver's Notebook

How I clean my kitchen at the end of the day

Published: 2025-03-23

This is a guide on how to clean my kitchen. I wrote it up because I was writing it in my head while cleaning my kitchen and found that helpful. The audience this post is most useful for is me, and when I say “you” in it the you in question is mostly me, but some of the general points might be of broad interest.

However, many of the specifics of this are only useful if you share a kitchen with me, and thus have the exact same sets of problems, constraints, and affordances. If so this post isn’t really intended for you as that would be massively passive aggressive for me to write a whole essay telling you how to clean the kitchen. Instead, if you share a kitchen with me, I refer you to the large poster with helpfully big letters and clear easy to understand instructions that I have posted on the kitchen wall.Ha ha, just kidding. I haven’t really done that. Yet.

Anyway, there are some things you should understand before embarking on cleaning the kitchen:

The first is that it will, in fact, take about an hour. It might take a bit less. If it’s a really big dinner or a lot of debris has built up over the course of the day it might take more. But it will probably take about an hour, and trying to speed that up massively is going to mostly stress you out without saving a huge amount of time. You should probably just let it take an hour. You can resent that, or you can just put up with it, and you’ll have a better time in that hour if you do the latter. Put on some music, or a noise track and spend the time in contemplation, or if you must put on an audiobook. Maybe you can write a blog post about how to clean the kitchen in your head.Some of this process can be sped up by having an extra pair of helping hands but honestly our kitchen is a nightmare to have multiple people in and it doesn’t speed things up that much so I mostly just prefer to do it solo. Whatever you’re doing though, assume it will take an hour, so make sure to start at least an hour before bedtime.

The second thing to understand is that there is no such thing as “clean”, there is only “clean enough”. You are not attempting perfection, you are attempting to achieve a consistent standard of cleaning. This standard mostly consists of the following:

There are no full bins.
The dishwasher is running.
The surfaces are clean.
The handwashing has been done.
The floor is not covered in debris.I’ve not historically been super reliable about this, and am trying to add sweeping the kitchen to my cleaning process, but I don’t yet know if it will stick.
The sink should be empty and clean.
The kitchen should pass a “general inspection” for anything that seems like it really should be done every time and isn’t explicitly on this list and doesn’t massively increase the workload.

The third thing to understand is that it doesn’t matter if you’re too tired to clean the kitchen. The kitchen still needs to be cleaned, and if you don’t do it then tomorrow will go much worse. If you get part way through the process and you really can’t continue, you can stop, but you’ll probably be fine, because the process is on your side.

The fourth thing to remember is that the process is on your side. It’s there to help keep momentum up, make it feel achievable to do more, and minimise the amount of decision making you have to do, so you can mostly just autopilot the entire experience, and it’s there so that if you do give up midway through (you probably won’t), you’ve done the right things first, and so that you won’t at any point have to go “Oh fuck, I didn’t do that thing, I can’t be bothered to do that now…”.

Anyway, here is the process.

The process consists of a rolling series of goals. You should always do the highest priority one.

The first goal is there should be no full bins. There is a recycling bin, a waste bin, and a food scraps bin, and if at any point (including the start) of the process one fills up, you should stop whatever you are doing and empty it. If it’s obvious at some point that it’s going to fill up later, you can prioritise filling it up and then emptying it, but this isn’t required.I’ve not historically been super reliable about this making this top priority is a modification that became clearly good as a result of drafting this post.

The second goal is the dishwasher should be running. Once the bins are empty, all actions should be directed towards getting things in the dishwasher and getting it running. If it’s currently got clean dishes in it, first empty it, then load it, then run it.

The third goal is surfaces outside the kitchen should be cleared. That means the dining room and living room table need to have everything taken off them and the tables need to be wiped down.

From here, it’s a process of narrowing the area that still needs to be cleaned over time, one surface at a time.

My kitchen has two counters. Let’s call them sinkside and kettleside. The next goal is to get the kettleside counter cleaned and wiped down. This is partly as a restriction move, and partly because you’ll need the space to put extra drying up. Once it’s clear, lay some cloths down to put extra drying up on it.

The sinkside counter has two halves, left of stove and right of stove. Now clean the surface left of stove, corralling all remaining dirty dishes onto the stove top and right of stove area.

Your priority is now to wash the subset of those dishes that can’t go in the dishwasher when it’s finished running. These will be left to dry, you’re not going to manually dry them up.

At this point if you’re genuinely exhausted and it’s late, you may stop, but ideally you would not.

Your next goal is to handwash any of the dishes that could go in the dishwasher tomorrow, because this enabled the following goal which is get the right of stove counter completely clean.

If you can face it, clean the stove. Don’t do a proper deep clean of it, that’s not your job, but do get the worst of debris and the like off it.We have a gas stove and I hate it so much. I dislike gas in general, but I especially hate how gross and hard to clean it is.

Now, clean the sink. Throw out any food caught in the food traps, give it a general wipe down.

Finally, sweep the floor. Doesn’t have to be super thorough, just get the most obvious debris off the floor.

And, finally, done. Good job.

As I said before: Having a process like this really helps, because it lets you maintain momentum, see clear and visible progress as you go, and prioritise in a way that makes sure the most important tasks all get done.