The kitchen is, in fact, the heart of the home. It’s the place that has been an epicenter of the home since the beginning of time, the place where the whole family gathers. Maintaining and cleaning the kitchen is essential for the health and wellbeing of your home.

The kitchen is one room in our house where we invest the most. It’s also the room that has the most value when it comes to resale value. The kitchen, in a way, sets the tone for the entire house. 

Unfortunately, since it’s the one place used the most, it’s not protected from all the wear and tear. Kitchens are heavily used places and they are often the first ones to lose their original charm. The question is how to make sure that your kitchen looks new for a long time?

We’re here to give you an answer to that question and also to help you make sure your kitchen shines for a long time. Here are a couple of kitchen maintenance tips that will keep it looking like new for a long time.

Get Rid of Garbage Regularly

The kitchen is synonymous with all mouthwatering smells, imagine how off-putting it would be to enter a kitchen that smells like weeks-old garbage. The first step in maintaining your kitchen properly is knowing how and when to get rid of the trash. 

First, make sure you have appropriate recycling bins or bags for your trash and waste. This will help you deal with it in a better way, plus having little garbage bags all over your kitchen will make it less appealing and it will add to the clutter.

Try to get rid of your trash daily, regardless of how much garbage you’ve accumulated, the best thing to do is get rid of it on daily basis. Additionally, make sure you wash and disinfect your recycling bins regularly as well. This will keep your kitchen smelling fresh.

Cleaning Your Sink Is Half the Job Done

Don’t let the dishes pile up in your sink. There’s nothing more unsightly and messy than a pile of dirty dishes in a sink. Just imagine how much of a drag it would be having to wash all those dishes before starting to do anything in the kitchen – every single time. 

Instead, make sure you wash the dishes after every meal or every time you’ve used them. This way you’ll avoid all the unnecessary work and the piling of the dishes. 

In addition to regularly washing up, make sure you keep the sink clean as well. Kitchen sinks are one of those places where germs and bacteria thrive due to all the food particles from plates and cooking. E Coli and salmonella are some of the bacteria that thrive in dirty sinks and can get to your hands and spread to food eventually.

To avoid this type of risk, make sure you clean your sink often. After you finish with dishwashing, or even at the end of the day, wipe the sink with cleaning liquid and warm water.

Keep Everything in Its Place

Clutter is easily created, especially in the kitchen. That’s why it’s highly important to keep everything in its place. Every appliance, kitchen utensil, and ingredient needs to have a designated place in your kitchen. 

Once you finish using them, clean and return everything in its place. Also, to make things easier on yourself, make sure you organize and declutter everything. Every cupboard, drawer, pantry, and even your fridge. Make sure you get rid of things that you don’t even use and that make unnecessary clutter in your kitchen.

With everything organized and in its place, you won’t spend time searching for it and you’ll know exactly where to place it after using it.

Regularly Maintain Kitchen Appliances

How much do you depend on your stove, fridge, or even your dishwashing machine? Quite a bit, right? Well, you use them every day and that definitely wears on them gradually. Replacing your kitchen appliances can cost huge amounts of money, so to prolong their life you should take better care of them.

Don’t let them get so dirty that you can’t clean them anymore – cleaning them regularly really helps. Repair parts of your appliances that have broken down instead of replacing the whole appliance. For example, if the oven of your stove has broken down, don’t replace the whole stove. Call the appliance repair service and they can do a successful oven repair for just a fraction of what you’d pay for a new stove.

Take proper care of your kitchen appliances and they can last for a long time.

Remove All Kitchen Stains

Stains happen more often than not in a kitchen that is properly used. Greasy stains, food stains, and other types of stains happen all the time and they will continue to happen as long as you use the kitchen. The point is to remove them as fast as you can. 

There are many commercial stain removers available, plus if you want, you can DIY stain removers yourself. If you don’t have a commercial stain remover at hand, make your own with a mixture of baking soda and water. Similarly, you can use vinegar or other stain-removing solutions. If needed also leave the stain remover overnight to start working.

The longer you wait to remove the stain, the harder it will be to remove it. 

Thoroughly Clean the Countertops

Countertops are places we do most of our cooking on. Here we peel, chop, mix, and just heavily use the countertops. Just like sinks, this is where bacteria and germs are most likely to thrive. To avoid the forming of bacteria, clean your countertops regularly. 

Deep clean your countertops after every use. If you want to go a step further and make sure that bacteria doesn’t get trapped and start forming on your countertops, invest in countertop materials that aren’t porous. 

Quarz countertops, for example, apart from being one of the most durable countertops, are also the most hygienic. This is thanks to the natural minerals they are made from – they aren’t porous and there’s no place to trap bacteria and germs.

Regardless of what kind of countertops you have in your kitchen, make sure you clean them after every use.

Cleaning Your Fridge

The most important appliance in your home must be your fridge. As such, your fridge needs to be well-taken care of. You should properly clean your fridge every 3 to 4 months. 

This means that you should take everything out of the fridge, turn it off, and remove all the shelves and drawers. After that, wash the inside of your fridge with warm soapy water, shelves and drawers should also be cleaned. 

Get rid of the food that has expired and only return the food you use and that is still good. Don’t let the food sit for so long that it gets moldy or rancid.

Cleaning Range Hood

The single most disgusting thing in the whole kitchen is the range hood if not properly cleaned. The range hood above your stove is a grease magnet, and when grease and dust mix, nothing good comes from it. The combination of grease and dust over time becomes next to impossible to remove.

Thankfully, there are easy home-made tricks that can help you get rid of grease and keep your hood clean. Vegetable oil is one of such tricks. Simply, put a bit of vegetable oil on your cloth and start wiping the range down. It will regain its shine in no time!

In a similar manner, you can keep your range hood filter clean and grease-free. Remove the filter from the hood and boil some water. Mix the boiled water with a 1/2 cup baking soda and soak the filter in it. Make sure you soak both sides of the filter.

After some time you’ll need to replace the filter, but in the meantime make sure it’s nice and clean. And just like that, you can make sure that your range hood is always clean and grease-free.

Overall Kitchen Clean-Up

Of course, it goes without saying that you should daily clean, mop, and vacuum your kitchen floors. Also, wipe down all your cabinets and make sure that all the things that are on display are dust-free. 

Try to keep things minimal on the countertops, don’t go overboard with jars and containers. That’s what the pantry is for. As for the appliances that have to be on the countertops such as microwave, coffee machine, and so on, make sure they too are cleaned and maintained regularly as well.

Clean and wipe down the inside of the cabinets as often as you can as they too require your attention every now and then. Simply, try to keep everything in the kitchen as clean as possible.

With these couple of cleaning and maintenance tips, your kitchen can always look as good as new. You don’t need to invest huge amounts of money in kitchen remodeling every or every other year. Create a habit of cleaning your kitchen regularly and it will look as new for a long time.