Clean in a flash
By Laurie Mansfield
Des Moines (Iowa) Register
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| You want a clean house, but you don't get giddy over cleaning products? Use these techniques to speed up and improve your housecleaning strategies. Click on the image for more details.
Photo by Gary Fandel, graphic by Laurie Mansfield and Charles Apple, Des Moines Register |
So go ahead and give your house a good scrub. Get it over with.
Then pay attention to professional cleaner Laura Dellutri so you won't be chasing down dust bunnies the size of longhorn cattle in a few weeks.
Dellutri speaks at home shows around the country about speed cleaning — in her words, cleaning smarter and faster, not harder.
The premise is that if you make yourself speed-clean your house every week, you won't have a big mess to deal with later. But speed cleaning is not something that works with homes whose owners neglect them for three years, she says. First, spring cleaning is a must.
After that, once a month you might want to do another thorough cleaning.
"But every week, just zip in and out of there," she says.
Handy tools for speed cleaning are readily available — convenient cleaning products such as disinfectant-soaked wipes and all-in-one mop kits appeared en masse on store shelves last year.
What you need now is motivation, which is where Dellutri comes in. After listening to her dish the trade secrets of professional cleaners (she started her own janitorial cleaning company), it seems possible to meet her goal: Cleaning a 2,000-square-foot home in under two hours.
First, Dellutri says, get your cleaning kit together. Professional cleaners carry their kits at all times so they don't backtrack and lose time. Also, lighten the load. For example, leave the vacuum attachments behind and carry a whisk broom instead. The palm-size broom can fit in your pocket and can knock dust from corners, lampshades, windowsills and other hard-to-reach places.
Look for products that perform several duties. One bottle of glass cleaner with disinfectant can be used to clean most surfaces (except wood), eliminating the need to carry several cleaners, she says.
Most people overclean with chemicals, she says.
"Ninety percent of the surfaces in the home need to be cleaned with water," she says. "Only 10 percent need to have disinfectant."
So picture this, Dellutri says: Take your glass cleaner, a couple of cleaning cloths and a pretreated mop into your bathroom once a week. Spray your sinks, mirrors, tub and showers with the glass cleaner and wipe clean.
"You can do your whole bathroom in under five minutes," she says.
The other method professional cleaners use to cut cleaning time is to work the room from top to bottom and then in a circle.
Cleaning the room from ceiling to floor forces us to check out the entire room, including overlooked areas such as corners and walls.
Follow by cleaning the room in a circle.
A cleaner can miss such things as trash, cobwebs and spots on furniture if they don't take an organized approach, Delltri says.
It also helps to practice what Dellutri calls "preventive cleaning."
That means keeping areas such as countertops as clutter-free as possible so all you have to do is spray and wipe.
• • •
Deep cleaning (spring cleaning): The more ambitious or detailed tasks that are normally done a few times a year, such as cleaning light fixtures by hand, wiping all baseboards and removing buildup from a surface. Deep cleaning involves a complete cleaning of a room from top to bottom and can take as much as four to five hours depending on how long you go between deep cleanings and how many helping hands you have.
Basic cleaning: Cleaning chores done on a regular basis to maintain the minimum cleanliness level in your home. This includes vacuuming, dusting, disinfecting bathrooms, removing trash, washing all hard floors — not daily cleaning chores.
Spruce-up/speed cleaning:
A light cleaning of surfaces that are barely dirty and just need a little dusting or shining. Spruce-up cleaning can be done in 15 to 30 minutes. It's easy. Best of all, spruce-up cleaning gives us a level of confidence that our homes can be cleaned quickly and easily.
Minutes spent for sprucing up
- 5: Shining bathroom sinks, mirrors and toilets.
- 5: Shining kitchen appliances, counters and sink.
- 10: Vacuuming traffic areas only.
- 5: Spot-mopping floors.
- 3: Tidying magazines, pillows and throws.
- 3: Removing mail, toys and newspapers.
