I Tried the “5 Senses” Method to Clean, and It Helped Me Tackle Dreaded Tasks
I’ve put a lot of cleaning and organization strategies to the test, including a “magic basket” organizing trick and a “closing shift” cleaning method. So when I learned about the “five senses” method about a month ago, I was instantly intrigued and wanted to give it a try.
What Is the 5 Senses Method?
This cleaning method takes inspiration from (you guessed it) the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. The idea is that by focusing on a different one each day, you’re able to take care of the tasks you might not usually be able to get to. Because the method takes place over five days, it’s easiest to complete across the weekdays and lets you free up your weekends. (The home filtration brand Filtrete even created a cleaning checklist around these senses that you can try for yourself.)
Compared to most cleaning strategies, the five senses method is fairly unique. There’s also a lot of flexibility with the process, which makes completing it very attainable. For example, I chose dusting for my “sight” task, but it could have easily applied to “touch” as well. Your “taste” task could be something as simple as cleaning out your dog’s bowls or as tedious as polishing silverware.
How I Tried the 5 Senses Method
For five days straight, I focused on a different sense and task. Here’s how it went.
Day 1: Sight
I have a cat, so I’m constantly fighting a losing battle against dust and dander. Because it’s one of my biggest annoyances in the house, I figured it was just the thing to tackle today. As I walked around the house with my duster in hand, I was able to fix little things I noticed along the way, like objects in the wrong places and unidentifiable sticky spots (courtesy of my 5-year-old). It was motivating to be able to multitask on the first day!
Day 2: Sound
I live in an old home with squeaky hardware aplenty, making WD-40 my not-so-secret weapon. As thorough as I try to be, I always seem to find more hinges and drawer slides in need of some TLC. It’d been a minute since I last pulled out my WD-40, and this was the perfect day to take care of them.
Sometimes you don’t know how irritating something is until it’s gone. As someone with hearing loss, high pitches can be especially excruciating — so the whole house just felt calmer once I hit all the problem areas.
Day 3: Smell
The trash can in my kitchen is located under the sink, and with a 5-year-old, it’s not unusual for the stuff she throws away to land outside of it. But the trash grosses me out, and I hate having to deal with it for any longer than I have to. I’ve wiped down the trash area before, but knowing today was focused on smell, I appreciated the end results a little bit more.
Plus, because I was so focused on this being “smell day,” I finally thought to give the pipes a good wipe-down too. This is how I realized that they aren’t actually beige (so typical for an old rental property). Whether they were painted to match the interior or it’s just decades of buildup, I’m not sure, but I’ll need different tools to find out later.
Day 4: Taste
I don’t clean out the fridge nearly often enough. Leftovers get stacked up, expiration dates are missed, and sometimes I let crumbs and spills sit for an embarrassing amount of time. Most people have that one chore they hate doing, and this one is mine.
I’m not going to say that I like doing it now any more than I did before, but I did appreciate the accountability this challenge provided. It gave me a reason to clean out the fridge before I reach my breaking point, which (unsurprisingly) makes the cleanup easier.
Day 5: Touch
Before I even started the method, I knew what I was going to tackle on this day: towels. I make a point to purchase high-quality, luxuriously fluffy towels for myself, but they inevitably lose a little bit of softness with every wash. This is because there’s a buildup of detergent and body oils that needs to be stripped. Knowing the problem, had I ever tried to fix it? No. (That would be too easy.) The solution was comically simple — all I had to do was replace the laundry detergent with distilled white vinegar and run an extra rinse cycle.
While one wash didn’t revive the towels back to their original state, I definitely felt a difference. For so long, I put off the literal minute it took to take the vinegar from the pantry to the laundry and back again. The question is, why?
Final Thoughts
I’m probably not going to try to keep this up on a weekly or perhaps even monthly basis, but I think the concept is solid. It helped me tackle the things I’d been putting off in an incredibly approachable way, and all of my senses really did feel more at ease by the end of the experiment. My plan is to pull out this cleaning method when managing the house starts to feel a little overwhelming, so I can break up both the monotony and my most dreaded tasks.
Further Reading
Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Article’s DTC Furniture
We Tested (and Rated!) All the Sofas at Pottery Barn — Here Are the Best for Every Type of Need
