11 Hotel Housekeeping Rules Americans Break (That Make Your House Look Messy)

A hotel room gets put back to the same exact state hundreds of times a week, by women who have never lived in it and never will. It comes out right every time, and it is not because we tidied harder than you do. We never tidied at all. MY BOOK: The Spotless Method, the whole system written down in the order I'd actually do it. spotlessmethod.com In forty years of hotel housekeeping I learned that a room stays right because of two things nobody teaches at home: a par, which is the fixed count of what belongs on a shelf, and a rule that a surface is a working surface and not a shelf. Nobody on a floor ever stood there deciding. The shelf told them. Today I'm giving you the eleven rules a hotel runs on, and the eleven an American house breaks, in order. And I want to be plain about one thing before you start. Not one of these asks you to own less. There is no donation bag at the end of this video. Everything you own tonight you can still own on Friday. This is about where things live, and what your surfaces are allowed to hold. What's inside: • Why a drawer of six stacked shirts is a drawer holding one shirt and storing five • The cabinet pile, and the cheap fix from the office supply aisle that ends it • Your counter, and the ring of dead space around every object sitting on it • The five inches of empty air above your plates that you pay rent on every month • Oldest in front, labels facing out, and why you keep buying a second one • The junk drawer, which is not a discipline problem but a property of open space • Wide furniture versus tall, and why the ceiling is the free part of your house • The closet measured in rail instead of floor, and the shoes that come up off it • Opaque containers, and why one person ends up holding the whole pantry in her head • Storage bought one crisis at a time, and why none of it stacks • The six inches beside your refrigerator that has never held anything • And the one I didn't number: the service entrance, three feet inside your front door Nothing on this list needs a ladder, a knee on the floor, or a single reach above your shoulder. Heavy lives between hip and shoulder, light and rare goes high, and anything that goes into a wall belongs to somebody else's drill. Pick ONE. I never taught a new girl two things in the same week, and I won't do it to you. I read every comment. Tell me which of the eleven is the biggest problem in your house right now, and which one you're going to do first. New videos every week on keeping a lovely home after 60, gently, and in the right order.