Alright, I am living the dream. My own bachelor pad in an awesome location with a large enough TV to dwarf everything else in the living room. I thought i had it all figured out when i moved in over a year ago. And then reality struck. Started with Dishes then laundry later it was sheets, curtains, couch stains, carpet cleaning, grime!! And then all of them together if ignored for a sufficiently long time..

Now don't get me wrong, i have grown up cleaning up my own mess but taking care of a huge house was something that i never bargained for!! There are some lessons though that if i had known would have made life much easier. So here it goes for wannabe bachelors living alone:

  • Rule 1: Faster you clean up the mess behind you, lesser is the mess that you end up cleaning over the weekends.
  • Rule 2: If given a choice avoid white couches. However great they look, sooner or later they turn a shade of cream that will bring the whole place down!
  • Rule 3: If you do end up with a white couch and hence stains from hell, please don't try to just wash them using normal detergent. It will end up as a bigger stain with clear wet marks making it even worse
  • Rule 4: Tea coasters are your best friends. Irritating though they might be, the effort to lift one and put on the table beats removing obstinate tea stains which require an industrial strength cleaner to remove
  • Rule 5:  Clean the oven, clean the oven! If not, very soon all the cooked food will start having the distinct smell of burnt bread!
  • Rule 6: If you are out of air tight containers for your biscuits, put them in the fridge. Keeps it crisp and fresh!
  • Rule 7: When washing shoes in your washer/dryer, make sure the dryer is off. Else your house is going to stink of burnt rubber for probably a year!
  • Rule 8: Generally a good idea to pile all clothes for laundry in one place rather than strewn with  geometric precision all over. Takes less time to gather and you quickly know when it is time to pile them in the washer
  • Rule 9: You need a big enough distraction to draw attention away from the general mess that abounds in the house. A beautiful vase with flowers or an unusual sculpture normally does the trick!
  • Rule 10: The TV remote, laptop, house keys & a pair of clean socks should all be in the most easily located place in the house to save precious time and energy spent in desperately searching for them
Super Rule: This is most important. For your house to be clean, you need to designate a place that is the dump for all the stuff that goes nowhere in particular. More importantly, this needs to be in the most innocuous of places so that you don't have to bother some one finding it out...