Are you hosting Thanksgiving this year? Do you know that there are only 3 weekends between Halloween and Thanksgiving? Start your heavy duty holiday cleaning now to minimize stress—your family will thank you!

If you get to go to someone else’s clean home for Thanksgiving, follow this plan anyway and you’ll be one step ahead for your organized Christmas!

Clean Your House by Thanksgiving!

It’s easy to clean your home in a hurry—the regular cleaning, that is: vacuum, mop, laundry, dishes…. You do all that every day, and you should be able to get your house ready to host anything from a playdate to a dinner party in just a few hours.

But cleaning your home when you host Thanksgiving is a little different!

• You use dishes and linens you only pull out once a year.
• You have overnight guests.
• You need to use rooms you’ve been using as storage areas or clutter catch-alls.

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Use this weekend to do the tedious and annoying—but necessary—jobs so you can be totally organized this Thanksgiving, and you can use those last few precious moments before guests arrive for Thanksgiving dinner to arrange a beautiful table—instead of frantically ironing the tablecloth!

5 Things You Need to Clean Before Thanksgiving!

1. Wash and iron tablecloths and cloth napkins.

• • Tablecloths stored all year will smell dusty, and stains you didn’t notice when you stored them are still there! Pretreat, soak, and wash your tablecloths and cloth napkins, and iron them right out of the dryer.
  • Don’t wash them with other items, because tablecloths and napkins attract hair like a magnet, and nobody at your Thanksgiving table wants to wipe their mouth with your hair. Look closely as you’re ironing so you can remove any hairs you find! And for the love of all things holy, keep pets away from your clean table linens!
  • I love these festive Thanksgiving table linens: not-cheesy Turkey tablecloth and terra cotta cloth napkins.

• Remember to wash and iron a few extra napkins to line bread baskets and put under pitchers or wine bottles to keep the kitchen counter and tablecloth clean.

2. Wash all sheets, blankets, and mattress covers.

• Overnight guests deserve a freshly made bed, and it takes at least 3 loads of laundry to wash bedding:
  1. mattress cover (after throwing out 4 different mattress covers that melted into a wad of plastic in the dryer, I finally found one that’s easy to wash and dry: cheap, soft, and waterproof mattress pad.)
  2. sheets
  3. blanket

Do bedding in that order (mattress cover then sheets then blanket) so you can make the bed right out of the dryer—no piles! Wash guest room bedding now and your linens will still be fresh for your Thanksgiving guests!

Close the guest room door to keep pets off the bed, and vacuum yourself out of the room so you’ll have evidence if a kid crosses your clean barrier: little footprints on the perfect carpet. I’m only kind of kidding, because no mom wants to thoroughly clean anything twice.

• • If guests will be using your kids’ beds, go ahead and wash everything today, then re-wash the sheets and blankets a few days before Thanksgiving (the mattress cover should still be clean). Have your kids sleep in sleeping bags—either on their beds or on the floor! Fun for the kids, and less work for you at crunch time! These sleeping bags pack up super small for easy storage.

• If your pillows are gross, you can pick up new pillows for about $3 each at any Kohl’s/Walmart/Target, or upgrade to nicer pillows for about $6 at Ross/Marshall’s/TJ Maxx.
  • • I write the date on the pillow tag with a Sharpie and toss the pillows every year.
    • Pillow protectors never work for me. Instead, I double bag each pillow with regular pillowcases. Here’s the cheap set of 12 white pillowcases I buy.

3. Wash all your serveware, china, silverware, and stemware.

• • There are grosser experiences than drinking out of a musty wineglass, but not many. Most holiday dishes and glasses have to be handwashed. Do it now, not on crazy-busy Thanksgiving morning!
  • Dry everything to a shine, and stash it all in an out of the way place, like on a card table in the corner of the dining room. (If you put the dishes on the dining table, you’ll have to move them again when you set the table!) Cover it all with a clean sheet to keep the dust off.
  • These 6-ounce wine glasses are inexpensive and gorgeous—and the small size helps keep Thanksgiving civilized.

4. Detail the bathrooms. All of them.

• • Don’t assume guests will only use the guest bathroom—of course you’ll show your guests to another bathroom if the guest bathroom is occupied!
  • Sit on the (closed) toilet in each bathroom in you home and look around like you’re a guest. See those dusty baseboards? That mystery spot on the wall? The crooked picture? The dirty edge outside the shower? So will your guests! Detail all your bathrooms this weekend so you’ll just have to do a quick swipe every day and avoid panic cleaning on Thanksgiving Day!
  • I’ve gone through 12 bottles of this Clorox Healthcare accelerated peroxide disinfectant spray this year. I love that it doesn’t stink and kills all the germs with only 30 seconds of “wet time”! (Did you ever read your Clorox Wipes canister instructions? “Wet time” required to kill germs is 4 minutes! The wipes aren’t even wet enough when you buy them to keep a surface wet for more than 1 minute, so guess what? You’ve just been pretending to sanitize your home since the invention of Clorox Wipes.)

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5. Detail the Kitchen.

• Nobody wants to eat in a home that has a dirty kitchen! When you host Thanksgiving, guests don’t worry about the dishes in the sink when you’re in the middle of preparing the Thanksgiving feast, but they will be grossed out by your nasty, filthy faucet covered in months of grime and hard water deposits. The simplest solution is to wet a towel or paper towel with vinegar and wrap it around the faucet (or rubberband a ziploc bag of vinegar over the faucet if that is caked up with mineral deposits). By the next day you should be able to easily scrub the residue off with a scrub sponge.
• Clean your oven this weekend—it’s not going to get super dirty over the next few weeks, and you won’t be humiliated when you open the oven door to pull out the Thanksgiving turkey! Plus, self-cleaning ovens are notorious for breaking after they run a self-cleaning cycle. If you clean the oven now and it does break, better now when you have time to get it repaired than on Thanksgiving morning. FYI if you are replacing your oven, DO NOT BUY A FRIGIDAIRE OVEN! This is the biggest regret-purchase of the last five years for me. Frigidaire is no longer a trusted American brand. Within three days, my new oven looked worse than the 15-year-old oven I replaced!
• Clean all of your cabinets inside and outside (cleaning lower cabinets is a perfect job for kids), detail the stove, clean the outside of the dishwasher, and pull everything off the counters and scrub the nooks and crannies.
• Clean the outside, top, and inside of your fridge.
• This little bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap is basically a lifetime supply. Dilute it with water in a spray bottle, and scrub kitchen cabinets and everything else in the house to a clean shine.
  

  More Christmas fun from All Day Mom:

  

  

  Christmas, Organized.

  

  Great Books to read to your kids over Christmas vacation!

  

  Paleo Chicken Nuggets Recipe—fast food in your freezer for busy nights!

  

  How to have a Merry Christmas without spending a dime!

  

  Clean Your House by Thanksgiving! 5 Things You Have to Clean Before You Host Thanksgiving!