10 Hacks to Keep Your Car Clean and Organized

There are many reasons why one might want to keep a car clean and organized, and many ways to go about it. It is often said that a dirty environment is representative of a chaotic and cluttered mind. If that is true, then a clean car leads to a clear mind. Our days are stressful enough, and there's nothing worse than having to spend a good portion of our day in a messy car. All that junk takes up space in our mind, and it makes us even more anxious.

Even if you don't take into account how a disorganized and dirty car makes you feel, how do you think other people will feel when they enter a car that is full of useless items and which smells foul? It doesn't give off the greatest impression of you as a person. How we do one thing is usually how we do everything else in life. That is why car care is so important.

Having a clean and organized car leaves you with one less thing to worry about. However, just the act of thinking about cleaning our car is enough to overwhelm us. The hacks that you are about to see will show you that it doesn't take a herculean effort to keep your vehicle organized. They are fairly simple to implement and they are easy to maintain once you set them up. After all, if they take more effort than what you are doing right now, then they can't be called "hacks", can they?

Use a portable trash can.

Whenever we accumulate garbage in our car, it is easy to fall into the bad habit of placing it in our cup holder or on the floor. We tell ourselves that we will get to later, and yet we never do. There has to be somewhere our garbage can be placed without making the car a mess.

The easy solution to this problem is to have a portable trash can. You can use an old cardboard box or even use a large plastic container to hold all of your trash. All of your litter will be organized in one little place, and you will always have a place to put your garbage. Just don't miss!

Use toothpaste to brighten up your dull headlight covers.

Your headlights will become dull over time. Even with an established cleaning regimen it is easy to ignore your car headlights. Worry no more! All you have to do is take a little bit of toothpaste and scrub it all over your headlights. Let it sit for a couple of minutes, and then rinse the toothpaste off using water and an ordinary rag.

You will be surprised to see how clean and shiny your headlights will be after performing this easy hack. This is one of the more popular hacks that people use to give their car a clean appearance on the outside.

Use the Drop Stop.

Yes - the same product that received fame on Shark Tank! When you do a full cleaning of your car's interior space, you will be surprised to find all the items that you lost in the mysterious seat gap. We lose items only to never find them again, and we think we can retrieve them while we are driving.

Instead of taking this unnecessary safety risk, use the Drop Stop. It wraps around your seat belt, and it does an excellent job of covering that gap. The next time you drop something, it will rest on the Drop Stop until you pick it up again. Change, pens, your phone - you name it. Nothing will be lost to the infamous seat gap ever again.

Organize the back seats with a car organizer built for the back seat.

Out of all the areas in the car that can get messy, the back seat area is by far the messiest. It's the easiest place for us to store miscellaneous items and leave them out of our sight. Since we are keeping our eyes on the road while driving, we don't have any time to think about the items in the back. It's great for us … but not so great for the people sitting in the back.

There are car organizers that can be attached to your seat. They come with numerous pockets to allow for storage of several small items. They are a lifesaver for those who love to jam their back seats with junk!

If you are traveling with kids, you might want to install organizers on the backs of both front seats. Children like to bring lots of small items with them to keep themselves entertained on long car rides. These organizers will hold all of those items, and you won't have to worry about cleaning up after them.

Use baking soda to eliminate foul odors.

Having a clean car involves keeping odd smells at bay. It is extremely uncomfortable to be in a vehicle and have your mind constantly focused on an unpleasant odor. Many people like to use air fresheners, until they realize that those only mask the smell. They do not actually do anything to eliminate the smell.

Rather than invest in a chemical solution that emits toxic chemicals, opt for a cheap and nontoxic solution like baking soda. Simply apply some to your car seats, allow the soda to sit for 5 minutes, and then vacuum all of the bits up. The baking soda is so effective that you will not smell anything - that's how good it is!

Create a bag consisting of your own emergency kit supplies.

Most people do not carry any kind of emergency kit with them in their car. We are not simply talking about first aid materials. Everyday things like toothpaste, Advil pills, tissues, handi-wipes, or a spoon can be surprisingly useful during the odd situation or two in your life. Be prepared and stay ahead of the game by having a single bag that contains all of these items. Everyone has their own definition of what constitutes an "emergency", so fill it with the things that you think you will need. Keep it in your glove compartment for quick and convenient access.

Use empty gum containers for easy storage and access to loose change.

Everyone likes to have some loose change around them in case they want to buy something small or fill the parking meter. The conventional solution is to keep all of your loose change in your cup holder. The only problem is that it can be difficult to claw through and get a grip on that one last coin that you need to make a purchase. When your loose change is there with other items, that makes it even harder to grab.

Avoid that scenario by putting all of your loose change into an empty gum container. Your loose change will go into a single place, and you will be able to get it out within 2 seconds. Your days of hassling with loose change are now over.

Use tabbed folders for your glove compartment.

The glove compartment is where we like to store all of our important documents. That is, when we aren't stuffing them into the door pockets. Insurance papers, the owner's manual, local maps, and any other important documentation usually goes in there. The only problem is that it takes forever to fish through the mess of papers to find that one item we are looking for.

A tabbed folder with the tabs labeled solves this problem entirely. You will have a place for each type of document, and you will know exactly where they are located. Most people can probably fit all of their documents into a single folder and never have to worry about running out of room.

Use a coffee filter to wipe your car's interior.

Coffee filters are used for one thing only: filtering coffee to give us a delicious cup of coffee. But what if that wasn't their only use? What if we could use coffee filters as a creative way to get some dusting done?

It turns out that you can! Coffee filters are lint-free and collect dust easily, which makes them the right choice for dusting off your dashboards and other parts of your car that accumulate dust. These filters are incredibly cheap, and they are easy to dispose of after you are done with them.

Use silicone cupcake liners to catch crumbs.

Crumbs are a nightmare for anyone who cleans their car on a regular basis. They seem to accumulate in the pockets that are hardest to reach, and they never seem to go away. We slave our entire lives away trying to vacuum up an extra crumb, only to have more of them appear the next week.

You can use a silicone cupcake liner as a holder for crumbs. They come in different sizes, and they just happen to fit right in the cup-holders of our car. They won't stop crumbs from going everywhere, but it is notoriously hard to remove crumbs from the cup-holder area. It's one less cleaning problem that you will have to worry about.

Conclusion

As you can see from the tips presented above, a very large part of keeping your car clean and organized is setting up certain hacks to prevent it from getting dirty in the first place. Prevention is the best way to minimize the amount of cleaning you have to do while having your important items in a designated place. You may have to do some regular cleaning to remove dust and other stains, but your workload will be significantly reduced compared to what you had to do previously.

The hacks in this article also placed a heavy focus on cleaning the inside of your car. This is because the interior is the hardest part to maintain. The exterior of your car is fairly easy to clean, and you can even opt to go take your automobile for a car wash instead.
You can probably find other cleaning hacks online, and you are more than free to try them out. Some things may work for you and others might not. Either way, make sure you do your own research and avoid car care practices that are harmful.