Surprise! Your friendly neighbor/nosy mother-in-law/neatnik best friend is stopping by your place in 30 minutes. But your entryway is piled with flip flops, your kitchen sink is stacked with pizza-crusted dishes, and your cat’s hair is blanketing the sofa.
How can you fake a clean house if you’ve got no time — and no live-in help? “If you’re in a hurry to make things look acceptable, it’s really about perception,” says Becky Rapinchuk, who runs the Clean Mama blog and online housekeeping course. “You want to concentrate on where people will be, not on a whole house cleanup.”