7 Steps to cleaning your home in half the time!

We know that for many people, cleaning their home is seen as a necessary evil. Everyone loves coming back to a clean and tidy house but few enjoy the work that’s required to get your home looking and feeling spotless. In this article we’ll give you 7 steps that our professional cleaners use to finish jobs in a fraction of the time it takes regular people, so that you can get on to spending your time how you like!

1. The Grid Visualisation Framework

When most people clean their homes, the process is entirely random. They might clean one room at a time, but within each room there is little thought in terms of what is completed first. At Scrubs, our cleaners avoid this trap by using the Grid Framework. Simply, each room or space divided into a grid. So, for a standard bedroom, a 3×3 grid would be suitable. Then, they will focus on completing a section of the grid at a time before moving onto the next. Doing this prevents the mistake of walking back and forth different parts of the room, wasting a tremendous amount of time and energy.

2. Top-to-Bottom

Once you have your grid system visualised for a particular room, you want to make sure you are focusing on all the top sections before moving downwards. If used correctly, gravity is a force that makes cleaning 10x easier. If used incorrectly, it can make it 10x harder so make sure you’re not working against! Dust and dirt falls downwards and so by working top-to-bottom, you will ensure that you will only need to clean everything once. Examples would include wiping the top of cupboards, high shelves and picture frames, before the desk, countertops or upholstery below.

3. Three-wave System

Once you’ve under understood the grid visualisation and top-to-bottom principles, it’s time to introduce you to the 3-wave system, which is made up of:

1. De-cluttering: First, you want to de-clutter the room. By de-cluttering, we mean things like collecting the rubbish, picking up laundry and putting away or tidying personal belongings. Doing this ensures that all surfaces are accessible for the second phase of the 3-wave system, cleaning the room.  
2. Cleaning the Room: Once the room or area has been de-cluttered, it’s time to clean! Begin cleaning going from grid to grid and top to bottom for the reasons outlined in the sections above.
3. Cleaning the Floor: Finally, you’ll get to a stage where everything is clean except the floor. It’s then time to sweep, hoover or mop the floor. Again, visualising a grid system can help you avoid having to go back over sections that have already been cleaned, as well as ensuring nothing is missed.

4. Have what you need on you

When cleaning your home, it’s important to have everything you need on you for that particular part of the job. For example, when clearing the rubbish, it’s much more efficient to go round with a binbag, throwing in items as you go, than picking up each item and walking across the room to the bin. Other examples would be to have a basket when picking up the laundry or carrying a bucket with detergents and microfibre towels when cleaning. By having the tools for each particular job on your person, it allows you to follow the grid framework and save time carrying out the clean.

5. Use the right tool for the job.

When completing a house clean, the tools that you use matter, a lot. In 2021, Scrubs upgraded the vacuums of all its cleaning staff and immediately saw a 10% increase in cleaning efficiency and 3% decrease in customer complaints. Whether it be dusting, cleaning the dishes, cleaning your oven or anything else, using high quality detergents and supplies will significantly reduce the time it takes to clean your home than it would have done otherwise. Even if you want to save money by cleaning yourself rather than hiring a professional, if you want to be efficient you should use good quality cleaning materials. Check out our article on the 5 best cleaning detergents to see what supplies our professional cleaners rate the most highly.

6. The floor is your friend

When customers first see one of our professional cleaners in action, they are surprised with how comfortable the cleaners are with dirt and debris being wiped onto the floor. However, if the objective is to clean in an efficient way, this should always be done. You will never see a professional cleaner wipe dust or debris into another cloth and then take it to the bin. It’s a waste of time! Remember, gravity is our friend and by using the 3-wave system described above we want all the dust to be on the floor before vacuuming it up. If there is a particularly large amount then it might be appropriate to sweep the floor before vacuuming and mopping. Either way, save time by using the floor as your friend.

7. Use S-Shape Motions

Once you have applied the cleaning detergent to the surface that needs to be cleaned, you should move your microfibre towel in an S shaped motion, rather than a more typical circular or back-and-forth motion. This ensures that your microfibre cloth only touches the surface area once, when it is clean, and helps avoid the common problem of wiping a surface area that has just been cleaned with a dirty cloth and therefore seemingly not cleaning as it should.

Ultimately, there is no avoiding that if you want your home to clean and you don’t want to hire a professional then you must do it yourself, which is going to take time. That being said, it should not take longer than it has to. Currently, many people waste hours by cleaning their home in an inefficient way. By following these professional tips, you’ll avoid doing the same so that you can spend your time doing things you enjoy!