How to Clean a Room for Company in No Time at All


It’s always amazed me how fast my husband can transform a room from complete disaster to tidy enough for company (so long as they don’t look at the baseboards).

His methods filled me with shudders of horror at first, but after seeing how well it works I’m now counted among the converted. I call it the PILE method, and yes, it’s pretty much exactly like it sounds.

Note: If you do not have small children or pets that scatter their toys, your pile might not be quite as large. The same principle of consolidating then sorting still applies.



• Step 1. Push everything on the floor into a single giant pile. Before I learned the miracle of the pile method, I’d start gathering items from the floor one at a time, then moving each to its rightful home before returning to retrieve the next item. Although it is disheartening to see a huge mound of assorted junk, it’s far more efficient to deal with it in a single sweep, rather than making a separate trip for each item.
• Step 2. Get a trash can of some sort, you will be moving this along with you as you go. Again, I’d never thought to move the trash can along with me, and would thus make several small trips to it as I cleaned. If you expect a lot of recyclable clutter, bring the recycle bin as well.
• Step 3. Working in a circle, quickly de-clutter all surfaces in the room. Anything that’s supposed to be there, stays. Trash goes immediately into the trashcan. Everything else goes into the huge pile.
• Step 4. Sort all the items in the big pile by where they will eventually go. For example, everything that should be in the kitchen goes into one pile, all books that need to be shelved in another, coats to be hung in another, etc. Everything that can be tossed should be placed in the trash immediately. If this is a major de-cluttering you might consider a bag or box for items that can be donated.
• Step 5. Take the sorted piles and move them to where they should go. If they belong to other family members, call them to grab their pile lest it wind up in the trash. At this point, don’t get bogged down into putting things exactly where they need to go in other rooms, you’ll take care of that when you go to tidy that room up.
• Step 6. Sweep the newly cleared floor, giving all surfaces a quick wipe down.

Finally, relax.

 The PILE method works so well because you not only save a ton of time and effort in making multiple trips, there is also less room for idle distraction. Often when I’m tidying, I’ll go to put something where it belongs only to find something else that catches my attention. Soon enough I’ve lost too many minutes before I manage to return to what I was originally doing.

There will always be a period when the room looks a lot worse than it did before you started, but the PILE method is a far more efficient way of getting everything where it belongs in a short amount of time.

Tracy O’Connor is the mother of 5 boys and a ghostwriter who also writes a personal humor blog.

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