Clean Your Home Fast in Two Hours
I love really clean and orderly homes but I hate to clean. Spending five days working at a job and then becoming a cleaning lady on Saturday is not my idea of a relaxing weekend with my family. But what’s the best way to clean your home fast?
When I’m home on the weekends, all I want to do is relax and hang out with my hubby and kids. Cleaning my home takes me away from the precious hours I have to create memories with my children (or drink a glass of sangria by the pool). When I spend half of a Saturday dealing with chores, I become defeated and stressed. How can I clean my home fast so I can get to the good stuff?
Pirates weren’t too keen on cleaning their ships either but it was something that had to be done. Every so often, the captain would stop by an island or landmass, “park” the ship and force everyone to clean. They even turned the boat over on it’s side (called careening) to clean off any barnacles, seaweed, or other flotsam/jetsam stuck to the bottom of the ship.
Pirates wanted to be back on the open waters as quickly as possible because it wasn’t safe to be topsy turvy on land and they weren’t making any money. Even pirates knew the opportunity costs to cleaning for long periods of time.
Taking the lead from the pirate cleaning ethic, it’s important to keep your home in good working order but just enough that you can get back out and have fun. With this in mind, I created a method for cleaning my home in two hours on the weekends. To keep it as easy as possible, I’ve outlined the simple steps to tidying your home fast below.
Step 1 – Set the Timer
I actually use two timers. I use the kitchen timer on the microwave and have a timer on my Garmin Vivofit 2. The kitchen timer is to show the rest of the family how much time is left and the watch timer helps me keep to my schedule as I move through the house. Staying on a timed scheduled will help you clean your home fast.
Step 2 – Declutter Your Counter tops
Get those dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Grab all the papers on the kitchen counter (e.g. bills, child artwork, birthday party invites, Chinese Take-Out menus) and move them to their proper place. Put anything that doesn’t belong in the kitchen (e.g. a sparkly tiara, a flip flop, a dog chew toy) into a box or laundry bin. This is your family treasure basket.
Once the kitchen counter is decluttered move on to your first bathroom and bring your laundry basket/box. Take everything off the bathroom counter that does not belong. Move all the items that do belong on the sink to another location in the bathroom. You should now have a bathroom sink free of clutter. Move on the next bathroom and repeat until you have all clutter removed from the counter tops in your home.
Next, go to your laundry room and clean off any errant items from the machines or tables. Remember, all errant items go into the laundry basket/box you have been carrying around.
Depending on how many counters you have, this should only take you about 15 minutes.
Step 3 – Wash Surfaces
Grab a mirror cleaner, your favorite surface cleaner, and a rag or paper towel roll. Move from room to room cleaning bathroom counters, tops of washer/dryer, and the kitchen counter.
Bathrooms: Before you take care of the bathroom counters, clean the mirrors above the sinks.
Kitchen: Wipe down the small appliances on your countertops (e.g. waffle iron, coffee maker, cookie jar) with a damp cloth or paper towel. Then proceed to clean the counter tops.
This should only take approximately 20 minutes.
Step 4 – Clear Floors
If your kids are helping you (and I hope they are), this is the perfect time to start singing “Clean Up, Pick Up, Put Away…Clean Up Everyday.” The objective here is to get everything off of the floor. I learned a very hand trick from How Does She’s “How to Teach Your Child to Clean ANY Bedroom in 10 Minutes” The author, Missy, does a great job explaining the steps to cleaning a room but I will modify it for any room in the house.
A. Make the bed (if a bedroom)/Clear the Couch – fluff the pillows
B. Go through each room and place dirty clothes in the hampers
I actually keep a hamper in our family room to make this easier throughout the week. Quickly go through each room and pick up any errant socks and PJs.
Think of this as a workout. You are cleaning your home fast and getting cardio as a bonus.
C. Cups and Plates Scavenger Hunt
Walk around and pick up any items that belong in the kitchen. If your home is like mine, there are errant cups of water everywhere. Dump everything in the sink (you will notice that we haven’t reached doing the dishes yet).
D. Pick up Toys and Books
Pick up toys, jackets, blankets or anything on the floor that is not trash. If the item is supposed to be in that room, put it away. If the item needs to go to a separate room, put in your laundry basket/treasure box. By now this basket might be overflowing. If you need to get a second basket, that’s OK. The key here is to not spend time putting away items in other rooms of the house yet.
E. Gather up the trash.
At this time, there should only be random pieces of trash on the floors. Walk around the house and pick up anything that is too big to sweep or vacuum.
I’m not going to lie. De-cluttering the floors can take a substantial amount of time, especially if the kids are helping you (have I mentioned they should be helping you?).
Do not – I repeat. If your child is over the age of two, DO NOT clean the floors in your children’s rooms. This is not your job. They may need help cleaning their floors but you should not be the only one in there doing it. If your two-hour clean is happening at a time when the children are not home, just close their doors and deal with it later.
This process should take about 30 minutes. If you are good about putting things away every night you will hopefully be done earlier.
Step 5 – Toilets and Tubs
Spend about 20 minutes cleaning your toilets and wiping down the tubs or showers. Clean the inside of the toilet with your choice of cleaner. Next, wipe down the toilet lid and sides with Clorox Wipes or another cleaning wipe of your choice. Spray down your shower and pick up any bath toys in the tub and put them away.
Note – the objective here is to not do a deep cleaning, but a surface clean. If you really love a sparkling bathroom, pick another day during the week (before the kids get up or after they are asleep) to get your deep cleaning groove on but not now.
Step 6 – Dust
Run around the house (we are on a timer here) with a feather duster, Swiffer duster, Endust, or whatever makes you feel like the saucy french maiden you are and dust your surfaces down. Do not take more than 10 minutes to dust. We are trying to clean your house fast after all.
Step 7 – Swab the Decks
Sweep up all hard surface areas and mop. While those areas are drying, get out the vacuum and take care of any carpeted areas in your home. Estimated Time: 20 minutes If your home is very large, you may have to increase the time. Since I HATE the idea of increasing time, I would delegate this (or another) task to a child or spouse.
Step 8 – Empty the Treasure Basket(s)
You know those treasure baskets and boxes full of family odds and ends you have been collecting for the past few hours? Now is the time to finally work through them.
The trick is to only take out your items and put them away. Next, announce to the family that they have a XX hours/minutes to retrieve their treasures from the boxes before it becomes a Goodwill (or other charity) donation. I usually give me kids a few hours to put things away up to about a day.
Getting rid of items not treasured by the kids is a great way to slowly divest yourself of the seemingly endless clutter. Estimated Time: 5 minutes
A Clean Home
That’s it! You are successfully cleaned your home fast in two hours. Pour a glass of wine, grab the dog leash, or take a sneaky bite of that chocolate bar in your closet. You are now free to do something you enjoy.
After careening the ship, pirates set out to party. They used their time on shore to gather provisions, hunt, and fry up meet. I’m sure rum was involved as well. Pirates turned cleaning their ships into an excuse to have a party and so should you.
Usually my kids help with the cleanup and I’m not above offering a reward for cleaning. The reward is not monetary, but rather, time with the family. Last week, everyone was very helpful in cleaning up so we all went to the local train park for a couple of hours.
You will notice that I conveniently skipped doing the dishes or laundry. These are two items that need to be done every day and are not part of the mad dash clean-your-home-fast before company structure outlined in the steps above.
If dishes are your hated enemy, give that chore to your spouse or an older child. If you are stuck doing the dishes, blast your favorite tunes or listen to a book while deep in the suds.
Tackling laundry inherently takes several hours. I do one load of sheets during my two-hour clean. Before I set my clean the home fast timer, I pull all the dirty sheets off the bed and throw in the washing machine. During my mad cleaning rush, I switch that over to dry.
After my two-hour speed clean, I put the sheets back on the beds and get the girls to help make their beds “pretty.” It’s still fun for them (as long as I help).
I hope this inspires you to get your cleaning out of the way on the weekends. Sometimes I set my clock for two hours and can’t seem to get through everything because life (aka – a child) intervenes or has a crisis.
If I can, I hit “pause” on my timer so that I can pick up where I stopped. However, if the crisis or child concern takes me away from cleaning indefinitely, I don’t stress it too much.
There’s so much more to life than having a sparkling clean home. I’ll raise a glass to that.
