How to hide that mess and welcome guests

While the holidays are full of planned gatherings, what do you do when guests are on the way and you find that you’ve fallen behind in your preparations? Or you turn around and the cats are shedding on the sofa, the laundry’s not all stowed and little Ethan has crumbled a cookie on the rug?

Cleaning experts offer some quick tips for last-minute tidying so that your guests won’t notice the mess in your pet-filled, kid-friendly home. Because that last hour before company arrives sometimes feels like a time bomb.

The key, according to Scott Grillo, of FurZapper — which as the name suggests, has products that deal with pet fur — is to focus on key areas and shut off the rest. That means entryway, couch, bathroom and your outfit. Remember, too, he said, that comfort is more important than perfection and people would rather feel welcome than on edge that they’ll mess with your showcase home.

He said you never want guests to come in and feel like they can’t sit down. And that can go both ways: so pristine they’re afraid they’ll mar it or so messy that they wish they were somewhere else.

He recommends using washable throws so you can quickly deal with kids’ crumbs and pet fur. Fluff pillows and run over the couch and chairs with a lint or pet hair remover to pick up any pet fur. While you’re at it, take a look at your clothing. No one wants to hug a fur-covered host.

Clear the clutter from the entryway, wipe down bathroom surfaces, get the extra stuff off the kitchen and bathroom counters and check for lint on the chairs and couches, he said.

Then relax.

“It’s going to be a mess soon anyway,” he said. “People are going to be there and they’re going to be eating and moving around and all that. So five to 10 minutes after they’re there, it’s going to look a little lived-in.”

If you’re worried people are going to wander where they shouldn’t, he recommends leaving the vacuum in the middle of an out-of-bounds room. Most people see that freshly vacuumed floor and don’t venture in.

Different cleaning styles

HGTV swears you can have your home guest-ready in 45 minutes in the typical 1200-square-foot home, based on advice it got from cleaning experts. Here, too, the advice is to focus on the visible areas where people gather.

“Queen of Clean Linda Cobb” told HGTV to take a laundry basket and circle the rooms, picking up what doesn’t belong. Stow it somewhere out of guest range.

She said to wipe down the guest bathroom and light a candle. The article adds, “Remember, that’s a room where guests will have a good amount of time to sit privately, unobserved and look around.”

Vacuum the main rooms where guests will be and fluff pillows, she said, then shut the doors to rooms you don’t want guests to see. She suggests making sure there’s plenty of light because a “well-lit room looks cleaner.”

Feel free, as well, to put a pot on the stove with some cinnamon and cloves in simmering water to provide a fresh, pleasant aroma, she adds.

Meanwhile, NPR has a “5 things” to do regularly so you’re not caught with a mess and scrambling:

• Collect trash but don’t take it out yet because that can divert your attention from the task at hand.
• Do the dishes.
• Pick up clothing and laundry (but don’t wash them right now).
• Put things that have a place away.
• Gather things that don’t have a place and stow them out of sight. When that’s all done, take out the trash.

Finally, Deseret News asked AI for its thoughts and found it had a lot to say about “quick cleaning tips,” breaking it into three types of speed cleaning: the basket method, the timed method and the “top-down and spray-and-wait” method that frees you up to do other tasks while the spray works on the mess.

Regardless of how you prepare, as Grillo said, “Comfort beats perfection. A lot of people try to deep-clean everything and that’s where they run out of time. Don’t worry about that. You want to do what you can, but don’t get too overwhelmed” or you won’t enjoy your own gathering.