You might want to consider family therapy, because your grandma is holding out on you.
Seriously, good house cleaning tips are hard to come by and it doesn’t look like grandma is sharing them any time soon.
Luckily we’ve got some “grandma certified”, ancient, but powerful cleaning hacks that came straight from the crypts of an assisted living home ( Honestly, we’re completely joking here! We love you grandma 🙂 ).
Tips On Cleaning Your House
On a real note, cleaning can be a daunting task and we wanted to compile a list of fast house cleaning tips that can help make your cleaning efforts more efficient.
The time it takes to get cleaning done depends on how much you want to clean, but if you follow these tips, it shouldn’t take more than an hour of work to clean through your house.
So, without any further ado, let’s get started with this list of top house cleaning tips.
Creating A Cleaning Checklist
Before you start cleaning, make sure you come up with a game plan. However you want to do it is up to you, but we recommend a house cleaning checklist. Label each area of your house you want to clean on a piece of paper. Every time you finish with an area, check it off the list.
It’s easy to forget to clean that long-neglected guest bedroom. Keeping your entire house clean is important, especially if you live with allergy sufferers.
Imagine them walking into a room that hasn’t been cleaned in weeks and breathing in all the dust/allergens that have accrued, not good!
This is why cleaning checklists can be crucial to staying on top of your cleaning game. On a side note, make sure you’re wary of allergy sufferers in your house, and follow the proper cleaning tips for allergy sufferers.
Buy A Caddy
No, not a golf caddy, a cleaning one.
These hyper-advanced buckets that hold all your cleaning supplies will make your house cleaning way more efficient.
Have you ever been looking around the house for that one sponge you love, or those missing gloves that you bought on Amazon and can’t find anymore?
Storing all your cleaning supplies in a caddy can solve that problem. Add a caddy to your under-the-sink essentials along with all your other cleaning weapons and you’ll never go back.
Now that you have a caddy, what should you put in it? Here’s a list of some things to consider:
- Plain old rags. Has there ever been a time you had to clean something gross but didn’t want to use your nice cleaning rags? Keep your old ones ready to do the dirty work.
- Paper towels. Some cleaning situations call for them instead of a rag. Make sure you’ve got a roll ready to go.
- Sponges. These bad boys can take on anything and are a cleaning essential.
- All purpose cleaner. If you have nothing else, get this for your caddy. Most people think they need a variety of cleaners for different jobs, but if you can find an all purpose cleaner that can clean just about anything, why would you use anything else?
- Gloves. We recommend buying a box of nitrile-gloves. Nitrile gloves are used by doctors and dentists alike and are by far the most sanitary and non-allergenic gloves on the market.
- Scrub pads. We lied when we said sponges can take on anything. Sometimes they can’t, and you’ll need to up the ante with scrub pads. If you’ve found food or other grime that’s been caked onto a surface, a little all purpose cleaner and scrub pad will get the job done.
- Duster. Because nobody likes wiping down a dusty surface with a rag. Yeesh.
- Dust pan. Dusters significant other. You’ll need this if you want to collect dust instead of sweeping it onto the floor, which is a terrible cleaning habit!
- Knee pads. If you’re a frequent cleaner, you already know the struggle of bruising your knees when getting down to the nitty gritty. Before you go out and buy a pair, make sure you check your house for old ones. If there’s any skateboarders or hockey players in your house, I’m sure they can spare you a pair.
Now that you have your cleaning caddy filled with everything you need, it’s time for someone to walk around and hold it for you as you clean.
Just kidding, nobody is going to do that, sadly you’re going to have to carry it yourself!
Do Your Laundry Before Cleaning
Nothing is worse than cleaning your house in its entirety only to realize you forgot to do your laundry, and now have to add an extra couple hours of stress cleaning your clothes.
Before you begin cleaning, throw in your dirty clothing so by the time you finish cleaning, your laundry will be on its way to being done. The only setback is you’ll have to stop cleaning to move your clothing from the washer to the dryer, there’s no way around that!
Regardless, getting cleaning done quickly is all about being efficient with your time, so make sure you optimize the right way.
Using an All Purpose Cleaner
We already laid out why an all purpose cleaner is a cleaning essential, but we want to reiterate that point. Not having to switch back and forth from cleaner to cleaner will save you way more time than you’d think.
The right all purpose cleaner can really clean just about anything if it’s high quality and versatile. Bonus points if you use an all-natural cleaner, you can kill two birds with one stone by saving the environment and your precious time, at the same time!
Compartmentalize Your Cleaning
This fits in with your house cleaning checklist. But be sure you’re sticking to one room at a time, don’t hop around when cleaning or else you’ll do a mediocre job in multiple places rather than a great job in one.
Time spent walking from room to room is time you could have saved by planning ahead!
Optimizing Your Floor Cleaning Strategy
Nothing is worse than mopping your hardwood/tile floors just to find out that you forgot to broom beforehand. Now there’s going to be wet conglomerated debris that you’re just wiping around on the floor.
Make sure you reverse the order and get brooming first. Clear away any debris or dust before you bring out the mop.
Once you’ve broomed, add an eco-friendly cleaning solution to your mop bucket and dilute with water.
Check out our dilution scale if you’re confused on how to properly dilute. When you begin mopping, be sure to start on the outer rim of the room first and bring your way inward, this way you don’t step on wet flooring and mess up your beautiful cleaning job.
Depending on the kind of floor you have, be sure to dry any overly wet areas on your floor, or you’ll risk water damage.
If you’re a DIY kind of person, be careful when using any type of vinegar solution, you can ruin your floors this way too.
Update Your Bathroom Plan Of Attack
If you’re using bleach and paper towels to clean the bathroom you’re doing it wrong. Bleach has a time and a place for whitening things, but in terms of cleaning, it’s really not worth it.
If someone says they’re not that sensitive to bleach, they’re most likely not aware of the effects that it has on them. Most bleaches use chlorine as a whitener, and chlorine is a detriment to life as we know it. As far as health goes, the only place for chlorine is in your pool tablets.
Cleaning your bathroom can be just as effective with a strong all purpose cleaner as it is with bleach. You can also enjoy not having to fumigate your bathroom for half an hour because chlorine gas is forcing you to leave as if it’s chemical warfare from WW1.
A all purpose cleaner should never turn you into a chemical warface victim, and we pride ourselves in that.
Along with an all-purpose cleaner, make sure you bring a microfiber cloth with you. Paper towels can do the job but what’s the point of wasting all that paper when you can do a superior cleaning job with one cloth.
Start cleaning your mirror and sink to start, then move onto your shower and any other appliance you have.
Finish off with your toilet bowl, because if you start there you may dirty the rag and spread germs to other parts of your bathroom.
Time Your Cleaning Efficiency
One great way of decreasing the amount of time you spend cleaning is to time yourself while performing certain chores. Write them down every time you do them, and after a couple weeks of logs, you can see what is taking you the most time.
Once you determine what is hanging you up, focus on improving that specific task the next time you clean and eventually you’ll decrease the overall time you spend cleaning. Just be sure you don’t go too overboard with logging or you may end up like Jack Nicholson from The Shining.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, some house cleaning strategies you use might be your own, and some might be from this list. We hope you could take some of these fast cleaning tips away with you for the next time you get to cleaning.
Regardless of whether or not you enjoy cleaning as much as we do, these tips should help you get better at doing what has to be done.
We just ask you that you share these tips for cleaning your house with as many people as you can. Everybody deserves to be able to spend less time cleaning and more time doing the essential things in life.
Nobody likes a magician who hides their tricks, or a grandma that hides their ancient cleaning relics. (Just joking here! Love you Grandma!)
