You may very well think that it’s an impossible task. Whether you’re undertaking home renovations or you just want to get a bit more time back after a busy week, to clean your house quickly can seem to be one of those things that just takes forever. But when you are learning the fine art of cleaning your home, it’s all about working smart instead of working hard. The fact of the matter is we don’t have to spend an entire weekend to ensure that our home is sparkling. Part of it is to do with splitting up the duties, but it’s also about making it go a bit faster.
This is a collaborative post.
Pick Your Battles
If you feel like you need to clean everything in a specific amount of time, you have to know at the outset that it’s impossible to do a massive deep clean. If you think that you need to do this every weekend this can prove insurmountable, and before you know it, your weekend has disappeared. Put a business head on your shoulders and think about what really needs cleaning at this moment in time; after all, many people don’t deep clean their home for months on end. And we also need to think about when we have specific issues that really frustrates us, is this something we can outsource? A very good example would be the rug. If it has seen its fair share of mud and dirt, and the stains are spreading, you may want to think about getting in contact with a service like Devine Rug Care as they will have the proper tools to lift those layers of dirt from the rug. You need to pick your battles because time is not on your side.
Leaving Things To Soak
We all know when we need to leave things to soak in the sink to make life easier for us later on. It’s worth getting into this habit, and not just with the dishes, but with many parts of the house. A very good example is when you’re cleaning the bathrooms. By spraying down every surface, and giving it time to get to work, you can come back and give it a simple wipe. While it’s doing its thing, you can get on with other tasks. This is the perfect way to make the most of a minimal amount of time. If you are trying to get everything done in the space of an hour, spraying every surface down, and then coming back to it later means that you will have a nice clean home, but you won’t need to put in as much elbow grease.
Focus On The Main Rooms
There are parts of every house that gets used more than others. Naturally, the living room and the kitchen have more foot traffic than anywhere else, but when you start to break down the task, do you need to vacuum the entire living room every time? The fact of the matter is if you are someone who pulls out the sofa and vacuums behind it every week you may not have much dirt to hoover up. You’ve lost some time and you could have been cleaning something else. So instead of vacuuming the entire space, go for the paths that are well-trodden. When you start to get into this habit, you may very well think about investing in a hand-held hoover. Because we very easily bring in bits of dirt from our travels, a quick whizz round with a handheld vacuum means that you won’t have to do a strenuous hoovering job towards the end of the week.
What Is Your System?
Do you even have one?! When you plan on tackling the housework, do you start by going for the bigger tasks first? It sounds logical to go for those things first because there’s a lot more to do, but again, it’s all about breaking down these tasks into more manageable chunks. We need to stop thinking about cleaning the entire house as one big task. By breaking it down into more manageable tasks, we are able to have some control of the situation and pick our battles. Partly, it can be to do with having the right system depending on the task. A very good example is your laundry; as you end up doing whites, darks, and colours it can take some time to sift through the laundry pile to find all of these things. By purchasing three laundry hampers for each laundry type, you are saving yourself a lot of sifting time.
Time Yourself
Nobody likes to clean their home, and this means that we can put it off, or we end up spending all day tackling the task, and getting annoyed that we have wasted so much time. Setting yourself a task of completing a certain job in a specific amount of time can make all the difference. This is why it is worth getting into the habit of mastering the 15-minute cleanup operation. If you are able to set aside 15 minutes to clean one room, and there are no distractions, you can get to it. The key is all about being prepared, knowing exactly what you have to do, and getting it done under a tiny bit of pressure. But you also need to give yourself a little reward as soon as it’s done. While cleaning isn’t fun you can still find ways to make it a bit more palatable. Put some music on, set yourself a time limit, or you could even take the approach of assigning everyone a room to clean. That way, you can have the entire thing done in one hour!
Cleaning your home quickly is partly to do with the hacks, but it is also to do with the challenges you set yourself. Preparation is vital, which is why we need to have a schedule in place, but when we figure out ways of working smart to clean our house better, we can spend more time doing the things that matter. Part of it is about having the right tools at your disposal, but remember, you can always fake cleanliness as well!
*Disclaimer – This is a collaborative post. This post has been pre-written.
