If it has to be done quickly or you just don’t feel like cleaning up in general, Speed Cleaning can save your day! We reveal what the cleaning method is all about.
Most of us find cleaning and tidying up terribly annoying, but unfortunately, there is no way around it. So when you hear about a way that promises to make cleaning a lot easier and quicker, you’ll be very interested. After all, we could watch our favorite show or just have a coffee in peace in the time we usually spend swinging a duster and mop.
Speed Cleaning seems to make this possible. But Speed Cleaning is more of a technique than a single trick. If you follow it, the whole tidying up behavior changes and you actually finish faster without losing any thoroughness. All you have to do is follow a few simple rules.
Speed cleaning Rule number 1: Always move in one direction only
Speed Cleaning is all about making sure that really every move is right and not a single one is done too much. This means: You go through the room once – in only one direction and not back. How it works: You start in a corner and work your way from there towards the door. Once you’ve walked through the room, you go into the next one. In this way, you move through the whole house.
Speed cleaning Rule Number 2: Take a basket with you to each room
In order for Speed Cleaning to work, you must always have the necessary tools with you. So think about what you will need before you start. Whether it’s a rag, feather duster or cleaning agent, put it in a basket or a bucket and always have it with you. By the way, house cleaning professionals work according to the same principle.
The basket is also important to collect things around you that do not belong in the room you are in. This way you can move them off piece by piece as you move from one room to the next, saving you a lot of walking.
Rule number 3: Work from top to bottom
Dust, just like everything else in this world, is subject to gravity. So when you start cleaning the surfaces, you absolutely have to start at the top. Otherwise, you will only have to constantly clean the surfaces that have already been cleaned.
This rule does not only apply to shelves, cupboards or windows, but to the whole house. If your house has two floors, start on the upper one. The dirt will also fall down the stairs and as we have already learned in rule number 1, we always move in one direction only and never look back.
Rule number 4: Only clean what is really dirty
Let’s say the shelf in the living room got dusty. Then it is very likely that it’s not the entire shelf but only the horizontal surfaces. The vertical surfaces are almost never as dusty as the rest. The same applies to the undersides of the shelves, they are also almost never as dusty as the shelves. So does it make sense to wipe the entire shelf once with a damp cloth? No, absolutely not. No one will notice and you have just taken away valuable time from yourselves.
The same applies to windows: There is no need to clean the whole window just because a few fingerprints are visible next to the handle. Grab a polishing cloth and only clean the area that really bothers you.
Rule number 5: Make it clean, not tidy
In order for Speed Cleaning to work, it is important that the whole house or apartment already has an organization system. You have to know what goes where. If you have to think about where you want to put things lying around or if you have to sort certain things first, you will lose valuable time.
This is where your basket or bucket comes in again: Everything that is lying around is stored in the basket until you get to the room where it belongs.
Rule number 6: Set a timer
The last tip is not an absolute must but can be used whenever it is needed. If you know that you will have little time to clean up, this trick can literally save you. Let’s assume that you only have 30 minutes for the whole apartment or house because visitors will come afterward. Then divide the 30 minutes by the number of rooms you have to clean up. But you can cut the time for small rooms like the hall in half and add this time as an extra for more elaborate rooms like the kitchen.
Then you can start your clean-up routine as normal. But with one difference: As soon as your timer goes off, you’ll stop cleaning up this room and move on to the next. The rooms may not be spotlessly clean, but the overall impression of your house will still be tidy and clean.