Keeping on top of the housework can be challenging, particularly if you have a demanding job and children to look after. However, there are steps you can take to ensure your home stays consistently neat and clean, even if you have a hectic schedule and don't fancy the idea of spending several hours a day cleaning. Read on to find out more about these steps.

Make it as easy as possible for yourself

You've probably experienced those moments where you've contemplated doing a quick clean of say, the bathroom, only to realise that all of the products and tools that you need are downstairs in the utility room or kitchen. It might sound slightly silly, but the truth is that if you're not particularly fond of cleaning and you've already got a hundred and one other tasks on your to-do list, seemingly minor inconveniences, like having to traipse around the house to collect the cleaning products you need, can be enough to put you off completing a chore.

As such, if you want to keep your home in pristine condition at all times, try to do what you can to make cleaning tasks as easy as possible. You could, for example, create small 'hampers' for each room of your home, into which you place all of the items that are needed to clean that particular area. So for instance, your hamper for each of the bathrooms in your home might include rubber gloves, anti-bacterial sprays for the toilets, glass cleaner for the shower screens, cleaning cloths for wiping down the sinks, and a retractable mop to wash the floors.

Adopt the 'little and often' approach

One of the mistakes that many people make is leaving the dirt and clutter to accumulate for several days until it reaches the stage where a deep-clean is necessary in order to make their homes look presentable. If you want your house to look neat and clean at all times, you'll need to ditch this method and instead adopt the 'little and often' approach. Put simply, this means that you should be doing small bouts of cleaning (say, less than five minutes) continually throughout the day.

For example, say that you usually have to wait two or three minutes each morning for your coffee machine to brew your daily espresso. Rather than just sleepily staring into space, you could utilise these free moments to improve the appearance of your home. In this short period of time, you could wipe up a few food spillages on the hob, give the floor a quick once-over with a sweeping brush or run a damp cloth over the kitchen table.

Similarly, rather than sitting around during the ad breaks that pop up when you're watching television in the evening, you could spend a couple of minutes picking up clutter, fluffing up the cushions or dusting the mantle-piece and window sills in your living room.

Provided you're consistent and use this approach every single day, you'll soon find that your home begins to look far more presentable and stops reaching that point where it becomes embarrassingly and overwhelmingly dirty.

Don't try to do it all on your own

Trying to keep a house perfectly pristine at all times can be exhausting, especially if you have a long list of other responsibilities too. Given this, it's best not to attempt to do every single chore yourself, as this will only result in you feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. If your budget will allow for it, it might be worth hiring a professional cleaner to tackle the tasks which you don't have the time or the equipment to do properly by yourself.

Carpet cleaning is one example of the type of chore that is usually best left to the professionals; removing all of the deeply embedded grime, dirt, food crumbs and dust from carpet fibres can take several hours and normally requires the use of some heavy-duty cleaning chemicals and equipment. If you can't afford to devote an entire day to this particular activity, then it might be a good idea to hire a carpeting cleaning company; they will have the products and the tools needed to handle this kind of chore.