Fast House Cleaning Tips

Tanya Mayer - 31 Oct 19

While everyone enjoys a clean house, people who enjoy cleaning it are a dying breed. We all want to do it fast, but we’re immediately confronted with puzzling choices – should we start with vacuuming or dusting, the bathroom or the kitchen? As we wonder the task before us grows bigger and our determination to actually do it gets proportionally smaller.

This is quite understandable – the household cleaning regime can be overwhelming in this modern age when everyone’s short on time. But, like every job, this one also has certain tricks born out of the experience that will help you clean your house in no time.

Combine Schedule And Motivation

First of all, these are not magic tricks – no house will clean by itself. The trick is to evade all the above-mentioned questions by creating a regular cleaning schedule. All chores are easier to approach if you set aside a specific time to get them done. Now that you have a schedule, your greatest enemies are boredom and distraction, meaning you need additional motivation. Creating an upbeat playlist will certainly keep you going, but try not to listen to the same songs every time. Since cleaning can make us feel like we’re wasting our time, listening to an audiobook will feel like accomplishing two tasks at once.

Set it up

Although there’s no magic, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for illusion. When you’re confronted with an unexpected visit in just 15 minutes, there’s no other option than to fake a clean house. This illusion is quite easy to achieve if you set it up properly. The easiest setup is to employ frameless wall mirrors that will instantly establish any room as stylish, spacious, and bright. Frameless designs have a seamless appearance, so just go over them with a damp microfiber cloth and follow by one dry cloth wiping.  Then simply get the clutter out of sight, freshen the air, and the illusion is done.

Don’t Hide, Deal With it

Illusions don’t last forever, so neither should your clutter. While some occasions will require stashing it away, picking up the clutter is mandatory before you start cleaning. But the most important thing is to decide what to do with each item as you pick it – will it go to storage, garbage, or end up as a donation? This step can take up a lot of time, so you can turn it into an everyday activity. All of us can spare 30 seconds even on the busiest day, which is enough to get some things done such as tossing unused magazines and junk mail. While these things might seem insignificant at the moment, they will certainly make a difference when it comes to organizing the clutter.

Break The Endless Cleaning Cycle

People tend to clean room by room, thinking that they’ll break the cleaning process and therefore make it bearable. But the truth is that this approach creates the feeling like we’re in an endless cleaning cycle because we need to start the same tasks over and over again. The only way to break that cycle is to clean the whole house instead of cleaning one room at the time. So pick up one task – mopping, vacuuming, dusting – and do it in every room before you pass on the next one.

Conquer Your Supplies

It’s funny how our cleaning supplies can work against us rather than helping us. There are so many choices promising ʽextrodinary cleaningʼ such as special counter spray or soap scum remover. If we just stop to think about it we realize how silly that sounds and that all those ʽspecialʼ supplies are actually a waste of both time and effort. That’s why you should minimize your supplies to basic ones: light-duty evaporating cleaner, heavy-duty degreasing cleaner, tile and bathroom cleaner, and powdered abrasive cleaner. These four simple products are perfectly able to deal with any ordinary cleaning chore and you can gather them all up in one portable place as a bucket or caddy.

Keep Still

The main reason why cleaning chores drain our energy so fast is that we tend to circle a room until we drop. But the truth is that there’s no need to do it more than once. The trick is to minimize the movement – once you’re before the bathroom sink, scurb the sink, polish fixtures, wipe down the counters and mirror before you move one inch further. Cleaning everything in your path as you move you’ll make every movement count and cleaning sessions won’t become an exhausting physical activity.

The purpose of these tips is not to make your home white-glove clean, but they certainly form a good strategy for quick maintenance of cleanliness and order.

Tanya Mayer

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