Cleaning can be extremely tiresome but it’s unavoidable if you want to keep your home tip-top.
The most effective way to keep your house fresh and clean is to adhere to the maxim, “Little and often.” If you adopt this strategy, you’ll never have too much work to do. Maintenance becomes straightforward rather than a perpetual grind.
Check out our weekly home cleaning tips so you can keep on top of things the easy way.
Rather than pretending there’s a magic bullet, our focus today is on developing a sustainable approach to lessening the work you need to put in at any given time by taking care of business on a day-to-day basis
1. Prevention Is The Best Cure
Contents
Stop as much dirt and debris as possible from entering your house in the first place.
Place mats both inside and outside of doorways. Ask people to remove their shoes before coming indoors.
Make sure that eating is limited to the dining room to avoid trails of crumbs all over the house.
These simple changes alone will reduce the amount of dust, mud and food waste being tracked inside simplifying your weekly cleaning job before you’ve even got started.
2. Vacuuming and Mopping: Make The Most of Mondays
Depending on whether you have carpets or hard flooring, you’ll want to vacuum or mop thoroughly at least once a week and probably more.
It’s sound practice to perform a really deep clean with your vacuum or mop on a Monday. This will take care of all the mess and dirt accumulated over a busy weekend with a packed house.
With the hard work done at the start of the week, all you need to do is give the floors a quick once over throughout the remainder of the week and give yourself Saturday and Sunday off to relax fully and enjoy the weekend.
3. Shotgun Cleaning: 15 Minutes a Day Makes All The Difference
If you think of hotels, the rooms are always immaculate but the cleaners are in and out of those rooms in a flash. How can this be? Well, it’s the idea of little and often again… Keep on top of things, get into a clean routine and everything becomes easier.
After making all the beds, pop all dirty clothes downstairs in the laundry hamper. Tidy each room giving yourself just a minute or two per room. Wipe down the surfaces in the bathroom and kitchen. Pack all stray dishes away then sweep up the kitchen floor.
However busy you are, 15 minutes is not too much to spare. By starting each day with a clean canvas, cleaning in general becomes much, much easier.
4. Go All Out: 3 Hours Is All You Need
With the foundations set and overall maintenance kept at a level that demands minimum time with maximum reward, you need to block out a weekly 3 hour session when you blitz things properly.
As a general guideline, clean from top to bottom and go in a clockwise direction. Go round each room once only for the leanest approach to cleaning.
- Kitchen: Wipe down the cabinet frontage working your way down. Clean inside your microwave and empty out the debris from your toaster. Remove everything from the counter tops and wipe down thoroughly. Clean behind anything fixed. After cleaning the sink and fridge, sweep the floors before finishing up with a dose of the mop
- Bathroom: Kick off by spraying a cleanser everywhere to loosen up the dirt nicely. Taking advantage of the same top to bottom and left to right method, systematically clean the toilet, shower and bath. Wipe everything down before vacuuming or mopping depending on the flooring
- Bedrooms, Living Room, Dining Room: Empty the bins before dusting everything down. Spray with your favorite cleanser and wipe down with a soft microfiber cloth. Vacuum your way right out the door
If you attack everything with purpose, your house will be gleaming without you feeling like you’ve really strained yourself.
5. Enlist Help From All The Household
Prevention and maintenance are uppermost in an effective strategy to keep a house looking like new without needing to employ a cleaner or break your back.
Ask everyone in the house to clean the door of the shower after using it in order to keep mess at a low. If you prefer to take baths, ask your family members to wipe around the bath after using it. Both of these tactics will dramatically reduce the effort you need when conducting a full-blown clean-up.
Clean up all impromptu spills there and then. Allow nothing to fester, nothing to be done “Later”. Every little helps in the fight for a clean house.
Don’t overlook the usefulness of microfiber cloths. Rather than simply pushing dust from one place to another, they’ll trap it neatly for easy disposal. You can wash and re-use these many times.
6. Consider a Robotic Vacuum: The Next Best Thing To a Cleaner
While we told you front and center that there are no hidden shortcuts to an effortlessly clean house, everyone likes to cheat a little…
Why not think seriously about a robotic vacuum?
If you tried one of these robots years back and found the performance rather lacking, today’s broad spread of options offer greatly enhanced functionality and take much of the sting out of vacuuming.
The added bonus is that you really don’t need to spend much to get the next best thing to a cleaning service without the monthly bill to pay.
Wrap-Up
We trust you’ve found some handy pointers here today to help you keep your house spick and span without undue effort.
Get in touch if you have any ingenious cleaning tips you’d like to share or any feedback at all. We’re always delighted to hear from our readers.
Happy cleaning!