Ten quick and easy speed-cleaning tips
Don’t just clean faster, clean smarter with these 10 tips that will shave chunks off your weekly cleaning time.
Keep one vacuum upstairs and one vacuum downstairs
Lugging a vacuum upstairs is frankly a pain in the proverbial. You’ll be more likely to do both floors, more quickly, with two machines.
Keep a squeegee in the shower
Squeegeeing after you’ve soaped and rinsed your lovely self will keep glass panels looking shiny clean.
WD-40 your glass shower panels
Go one step further than squeegeeing and coat your glass shower panels and door with a layer of WD40. Sounds eminently unclean but in reality it invisibly and silently prevents water and soap marks from forming.
De-clutter
Simply having less stuff means you’ll have less stuff to clean, which takes less time. Be ruthless about taking things to the charity shop, Freecycling, and throwing into the recycling.
The right thing in the right place
Keep bathroom cleaning stuff in the bathroom, furniture polish in the living room, and kitchen cleaning stuff in the kitchen. Sounds obvious, but I didn’t used to do this, and it has saved me a lot of time in getting distracted or losing focus while I was searching for the right tool for the job.
Clean top to bottom
That’s both in terms of top floor to bottom floor, and top cupboard to floor. That’s because if you clean bottom to top, dirt will fall down to lower surfaces as you go, and you’ll have to clean them all over again.
Pick it up
Never leave a room without taking something with you. Think rubbish to go in the main bin, newspapers to be recycled, clean laundry to go in the wardrobe, or children’s toys to put away.
A microwave marvel
Just microwave a cup of water for two minutes. The steam makes the inside of the microwave quick and easy to wipe down for a speedy clean.
Shift and dust
As you dust, move all the furniture to the centre of the room so you can easily go round the edge with the vacuum cleaner.
Invest in a doormat
Keeping a doormat both outside and inside the door traps a lot of the dirt that you would otherwise have to hoover up. 85% of dirt that ends up on your floors is actually tracked in on people’s shoes.