Alright so you have a cleaner schedule to come to your house today to make your house spic and span from top to bottom…… Anndd that cleaner is you. Maybe you are preparing for a party, trying to impress someone, or just plain sick and tired of feeling like your house is never clean.
You want your ENTIRE home to be as clean and organized as if the professionals had been there.
Except… how exactly do they do it? Surely they have some tricks up their sleeves.
They do! And here is how they work their magic…
PICK UP ALL THE STUFF
Clean up the clutter. Put all of the items left out on the countertops and floors back where they belong. Remove your large stacks of mail from the entryway tabletop. You need a majority of your flat surfaces to be free of stuff. Your goal here is to actually be able to clean underneath the piles rather than just around the piles of stuff.
LET THE CLEANERS WORK THEIR MAGIC
Use your cleaners to their advantage. For example do not clean the bathrooms first, but spray your cleaning solution on areas that are high in soap scum or grime. These areas include bathroom tiles, faucets, bathtubs, and shower doors. Let the cleaning solution sit on these hardened areas while you clean the rest of your house. This will allow enough time for the cleaning solution to penetrate through the scum requiring less elbow grease to remove it.
TAKE DIRTY SHEETS OFF OF ALL OF THE BEDS
This chore is kind of an added bonus when it comes to house cleaning. The professionals will do this for you, but sometimes they charge additional. If you decide to work with a local company like Sandia Green Clean they will make the bed every time with fresh linens as part of your service without any additional charge. If you are cleaning your own home start this process at the beginning of your cleaning day.
Your washing machine and dryer can work on all of the sheets while you are working on the rest of the house. Periodically stop and change out the different loads of sheets until they are all completed.
START FROM THE BACK OF THE HOUSE, WORK FROM TOP TO BOTTOM
Use a strategic route throughout the house. Start at the top by dusting ceilings, light fixtures, fans, flat surfaces, and walls. The best option for dusting is to use a damp rag instead of something dry. This will prevent you just pushing the dust off of the surfaces and off into the air. The damp cloth will instead actually capture the dust preventing it from falling onto another surface.
Continue dusting downward all the way to the baseboards. Take care to actually move knick-knacks around on the flat surfaces rather than just dusting over and around items. If you are spending the time to clean your house from top to bottom do it correctly. Also any hanging upholstery needs to be given a good whack or two to shake loose any dust or cobwebs hanging that can easily be vacuumed up.
Work your way around the house simply doing this task alone. Then start the next task beginning in the same room you started with originally.
Next wipe down all high touch surfaces with a sanitizing cleaning product or alternative if desired. This includes tabletops, doorknobs, desktops, and other flat surfaces. Continue this throughout each room.
Now you are ready to vacuum and/or clean hard flooring. Start by using the edging tool around the room then vacuum. Don’t forget to vacuum surfaces like cloth lampshades, upholstery, couches etc. Then clean all of your hard flooring surfaces according to the manufacturers guidelines.
CLEAN THE BATHROOMS LAST
Dust and wipe down your bathroom walls. There tends to be a lot of buildup of grime because of the higher humidity and steam in the bathrooms. Thoroughly clean your sink, shower, and toilet. Use your vacuum to suck up all of the hair on the floors. Clean the floors with mop and bucket or with a steam cleaner.
Prevent the spread of germs by cleaning from least dirty to most dirty (sink first toilet last).
Another nice perk about working with a local specialist like Sandia Green Clean, is that they utilize a color-coded microfiber system so that every part of your home is cleaned with a different color microfiber cloth in order to maintain the utmost quality without any of the cross-contamination (ie: cleaning your kitchen counters with the same cloth that was used to clean your toilet).
Cleaning the bathrooms last will also prevent the spread of germs throughout the rest of the house.
TAKE OUT TRASH
Now is the time to go around the house and remove all garbage from the garbage cans. Replace cans with bags if that is what you use.
CHANGE SHEETS
Replace all of the beds with fresh sheets. Make all of the beds. This will give all of the rooms a completed look and feel.
STAY CONSISTENT
Consistency and organization are key when keeping up a clean home. If you have heard that cleaning a little bit each day will save you more time in the end… that is a true statement. Choose a day of the week that you want to spend 3-4 hours (or more) cleaning your entire house from top to bottom just like the professionals do. If you are somewhat keeping up with your house throughout the week and putting things back where they belong 3-4 hours should be about enough time to get everything done.
WHY IS IT EASIER TO CLEAN SOMEONE ELSE’S HOME?
It just seems that even if you spend 3-4 hours cleaning your own home you never end up getting as much done as you would have liked to. Why is that? Because you become distracted. Maybe you were following the list, starting from one end of the house, working from top to bottom…. But then you remember you have a few bills to pay. You stop, pay the bills, and then resume cleaning.
Or another scenarios might look like this: You are cleaning your office and come across a stack of paperwork that needs to be filed away. You decide that the stack of paperwork should take priority over cleaning and start doing that instead. Or you are cleaning your daughter’s rooms and realize that you have to go through her closet and decide which clothes no longer fit her….
WHAT IS YOUR TIME REALLY WORTH?
Sometimes it’s better to just be honest and look at it this way: How much is your time worth? Perhaps your time is much better spent doing something that could potentially earn you much more time and money while giving you the freedom to be doing more of what you love. Not many of us love cleaning our homes, nor are we experts at it. Instead, focus on working an extra hour or two at your current job or saving money in other ways to free up the extra money needed to just have someone do it the right way so that you can focus on the bigger picture.
HIRE THE PROFESSIONALS
There is a difference between cleaning and organizing. And it is hard to keep these two separate when you are cleaning your own home.
If you have a difficult time keeping these two separate, call the professionals at Sandia Green Clean at 505.404.3071 or click here to schedule your free estimate today.
Don’t waste that 3-4 hours (or more!) of your weekend, become distracted, and never really finish the job you started in the first place.