The sun is out, school holidays are under way and we’ve all got much better things to do than clean. Here are five sure-fire ways to speed up those necessary chores, so you can have more fun and less toil…

1. Get a hand-held hoover. Sadly this has proved to be one of my best ever Christmas presents. I must use it at least five times a day. It saves me hauling our large upright hoover out of the cupboard and makes light work of meal-time mess, snack crumbs, spillages. (I’m also finding al fresco dining great for keeping crumbs to a minimum!)

2. Keep microfibre cloths all over the house, and bathroom cleaners in every loo. It is so much easier to quickly clean a room if you’ve got a cloth squirrelled away in a nearby drawer. Our bedroom always gets so dusty (yuck!), and now I am so much more likely to give it quick once over every couple of days when the cloth is so handy. Same with bathroom cleaners, it’s much easier to multi-task and clean the sink whilst you’re brushing your teeth if everything is to hand. Microfibre cloths rock – if you’re not using them already, you must!

3. Quick 15 minute blasts. I’ve started setting an alarm and only giving myself 15 minutes to clean a room/do a particular job and it really works. You race through the job super-focussed, and it gives you a bit of a work out too.

4. Keep a “Donate it” and a “Sell it” box somewhere in the house. I started doing this couple of weeks ago and it is really helping with decluttering. When the boxes are full or you have more time (like when the weather turns rubbish again) you can tackle them. In the meantime it is somewhere for your clutter to go whenever you notice it. Clutter = crap you have to clean around = it takes longer to clean.

5. Never leave a room empty-handed. This is a tip I’ve picked up on one of those “habits of effective people” sites, and it works. Before you leave a room make sure you take a quick glance round and pick up the bits that don’t belong in that room and deposit it in the right room. Ideally everything in your house should have a home, but this is the real world, so I reckon even if it’s in the right room it’s a start, right?

Hope this list helps. Would love to hear more cleaning short-cuts….


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