The goal with your daily clean is to make the house tidy and presentable. Trying to deep clean every day will only cause frustration (and take ages!).
These shortcuts will reduce your cleaning time, leaving your home tidy with minimum effort and you with more time to do something enjoyable, like relaxing!
1. Declutter a room quickly
Keep a few storage baskets in each room – colour coordinate if necessary so each room has its own set. Using baskets helps to tidy up an area quickly. Simply throw in all the clutter and place the basket back in place. You can always do a deeper declutter each month by sorting through and binning broken or unused items.
Similarly for post or papers; keep a set of magazine boxes and file or bin paperwork each day rather than letting it pile up in the hallway or on the kitchen counter.
2. Keeping knick-knacks in order
Large clutter is easy to deal with, it’s the little odds and ends that can take over. Keep small attractive dishes or ornate tea-light holders in strategic places – on a telephone table in the hallway, a corner of the kitchen or the mantelpiece in the sitting room.
Every time you spot a rogue paper clip, hair slide, nail file or phone charger, pop it in. Have a dish amnesty once a week to return all the bits and pieces to their rightful homes.
3. Straighten it out
For instant tidy, whizz around living areas and straighten out throws, plump up and rearrange cushions, pull any magazines and books into neat stacks and store away rogue remote controls.
In bedrooms pick up clothes off the floor and dump into the laundry hamper, quickly make beds – no need for hospital corners on those sheets, a speedy tucking under the mattress will do!
4. Keep all cleaning supplies together
Use a caddy to transport all supplies needed to each room. Take everything you need or you might find you’re going back downstairs to grab a spray or brush and become distracted.
Having everything to hand will help you focus and finish the task.
5. Your surface cleaner should be doing the hard work
Let’s face it, removing soap stains around sinks and tiles or grease from a cooker hob is a pain. Save yourself a ton of scrubbing (and time) by spraying a cleaner onto the grubby areas and leave it for a few minutes while you finish up another cleaning task such as emptying bins. The stains should easily lift off onto a cloth or sponge and need minimal scrubbing to finish off.
Use the same principle to clean toilets – pop some loo cleaner down and while you wipe the outside or change the bathroom towels, the detergent will do the work, leaving minimal scrubbing to finish off.
6. Cleaning wipes are your friend
Not only do you have to keep you house clean, but cleaning itself means washing cloths and sponges. Cut down on your workload and use wipes where possible. These exist for all sorts of surfaces – multi-surface, antibacterial… there are even wipes for leather upholstery and wooden counter-tops. Make it a habit to give a surface a quick wipe once you’ve cleared items away or de-cluttered.
Remember forgotten areas like the outside and top of washing machines, fridges or bins. It’ll only add a few seconds but the room will feel like it’s had a deep clean with minimum effort.
7. Only clean what you need to
Do you really need to dust the lampshades or wipe the outside of appliances every day? Try not to aim for perfection but for ‘good enough’.
No one wants to spend all day cleaning. Doing a little and often is the key to a speedier cleaning routine. That daily work won’t go to waste either; keeping on top of the chores will build up leaving that dreaded deep clean not such a fearsome feat!
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