A Practical Guide on How to Think, Plan, and Execute House Cleaning

How do you manage the house cleaning day? Do you hate doing it? A practical guide on how to think, plan, and execute it thoroughly.

I’m a busy mom of three children, and it’s hard to keep the house clean. So, for the last years, I’ve been trying to get the best results with the few hours I can spare in housekeeping. It’s not easy, but with some tips, we can have an acceptable clean house. It’s never perfect, the job is never really finished, but it’s good enough.

Here are some tips I’m glad to share with you…

Before: prepare your mind

Choose a specific day of the week for cleaning purposes and stay club to it. That way, you can prepare your mind and your agenda in advance. Involve, if you can, every member of the family. Everybody uses the house, so it’s fair that everybody helps in the cleaning day. Negotiate, also in advance, which task is going to be done by who.

Avoid criticism, and please be discreet with inspections after the work is done. Remember that, for sure, everybody hates cleaning so much as you, and arguing in the middle of the cleaning is the last thing you need if you want to complete the task fast. If the job is poorly done, just think that next time it’s going to be better. Don’t claim for perfection; accept the “good enough” and try to get it better next week. Remember that the days run fast, and each week, you have the opportunity to improve your work.

Before you start the battle 🙂 you should know your troops. Give tasks according to each person – small children can put their toys away but can’t clean their bedroom. They get tired and bored fast, so try to give them small different tasks. They will feel useful and important. Please avoid that typical reaction of moms that take on all the work just because the kids are young, fragile, have to study, or other excuses that both parts use to avoid confrontation or to keep away from hard work.

Decide your plan of action. Your time is limited, but the stuff to clean isn’t. Decide what need’s more attention for the time you have. The same tasks have to be done weekly, like dust cleaning, vacuum floor, bathroom, and kitchen cleaning, or changing bed sheets, but cleaning windows can be done every other week. Don’t be too ambitious with your plan, or you’ll be frustrated or exhausted. Maybe some tasks can be done another day, but be careful, or you can turn all your week into a cleaning day.

While planning for the deep cleaning, don’t bother about a bunch of old stuff you don’t require anymore. It’s stressful to manage the cleaning if the amount of old junk is just pilling up. You can go with several authentic methods to get rid of this unnecessary junk rather than dumping it in an unoccupied lot.

Disposing household rubbish (further, it depends upon the kind of junk) is a daunting task, and that’s why skip hire services are in trend for residential as well as commercial cleaning. For bulky objects that are laborious to maneuver, someone would hugely benefit from using a skip bin.

During: prepare for action

Choose your routine; mine is bedrooms, bathrooms, sitting room, and kitchen. Go to the next room only when you’ve done it. That way you can see some work finished – if you like, do some different decoration or add something nice, like a perfumed candle for the final touch.

Take all equipment you will need at once and keep it together, so you don’t lose time looking for every item all the time. You don’t need much equipment: a good vacuum cleaner, some cloth, a mop, a bucket, a kind of spatula to clean under the furniture, and for the bathroom, a sponge and some detergent will be enough. Please be careful with the products you chose for cleaning. Some are toxic others can damage the environment.

I usually start by taking staff from the floor to open the way to the vacuum cleaner and taking sheets out of the beds. Then I start from top to bottom, by cleaning the dust from furniture. For dust cleaning, a wet cloth will do the work; for cleaning dust under the furniture, a big spatula is involved in another cloth.

Look for dust on every surface, and I guarantee you’ll find it. Then clean the floor with the vacuum cleaner, and if you don’t have carpet or another kind of fabric on the floor, clean again with a wet mop – it will take away the dust that stayed behind. Let it dry, make the beds with a clean sheet, put everything in place again, and you’ve finished another room. Check for windows, and wash them if it needs.

Alternate hard work with a lighter one, so you can rest a little but at the same time, keep the work going on. Ah, and don’t forget to eat every two or three hours. Listen to music or radio is a big help but anything with images is forbidden – tv or computer is a big no – they’ll distract your attention.

Last notes – Cleaning and de-cluttering

Cleaning and de-cluttering aren’t the same kinds of tasks. It’s important to do both, but if you try to do it at the same time, the task may be a never-ending job. You’ll be tired before finishing both of the tasks, and it may be frustrating.

My trick to managing this is to impose limits on the de-cluttering. Just a set of drawers, a part of a closet, or a basket of toy – it takes some minutes, you see the work done quickly, and you don’t lose focus on the cleaning. If you do this whenever you have spare time, you’ll be able to attacks every problematic corner before it turns into an enormous task.

A house doesn’t clean by itself; don’t believe in magic formulas or appliances. The secret is in a good de-clutter space and some regular time to dedicate to the maintenance of your house.