National cleaning week begins on the 22nd of March and this year it’s my mission to help you get your house so sparkly clean that you can take the week off! In this post, I will share all my fantastic tips and discuss how to become a speed cleaner and clean a house quickly and professionally.
Whether you are running a cleaning business, a student wondering how to clean a room quickly or you are just trying to keep your home clean, you could probably welcome some secret cleaning tips from the pros to speed things up when it comes to cleaning your home quickly.
Keeping on top of cleaning can seem like a never-ending task as our lives get busier and busier. What better way to tackle those deep cleaning jobs than these speed cleaning tips. Let’s banish spring cleaning forever!

What is speed cleaning?
When cleaning the house we often get sidetracked, go over the same areas without realizing, spend a lot of time walking back and forth, and often do not finish the job because we haven’t used our time and tools wisely.
As a professional cleaner, I’ve carefully crafted the skills to clean homes quickly but thoroughly using the correct tools and speed cleaning products to get the best results in the shortest time.
The speed cleaning technique lets you tweak your cleaning skills to cut your cleaning time in half. It shows you how to clean effectively with cleaning tools and products, so you don’t have to scrub and waste energy.
I will show you how to prevent procrastination, how to maximize productivity, how to use your time well, and supercharge your skills to become an efficient speed cleaner overnight!
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What you will need.
A good speed cleaner needs the correct tools to enable you to fly through those tricky jobs without using too much energy. Work wise, not hard!
- A good degreaser like this one : used for kitchen areas prone to grease build-up.
- A cleaning disinfectant like this one : used for kitchens, bathrooms, and other areas requiring cleaning and sanitizing.
- A good quality wood polish like this one : used for polishing wood surfaces and for dusting.
- Tile cleaner like this one : for natural stone and ceramic bathrooms tiles.
- Bathroom sanitizer like this one : for cleaning and sanitizing bathrooms
- Glass cleaner like this one : for cleaning all mirrors, windows, and chrome.
- Powder or cream cleaner like this barkeepers friend : for the sink, bath, shower, and toilet bowl.
- Dishwashing liquid or liquid detergent: this is great as a multipurpose universal cleaner
- Dusting cloths like this one : for dry dusting.
- Red microfiber cloths for bathroom cleaning
- Blue microfiber cloths for kitchen cleaning
- Yellow microfiber cloths for general cleaning
- Glass cloths: blue, purple and silver for bathrooms, kitchen and general cleaning
- Speed cleaning apron like this one which has deep pockets
- 1-inch scraper like this one to scrape up dried food and sticky stains
- Whisk brush like this one to clean inbetween furniture where the vacuum can’t reach
- Telescopic Feather duster. to reach high cobwebs and window sills
- Green scrubby to clean toilets quickly . particularly useful where there is no toilet brush available.
- Non-scratch scrubby to clean delicate surfaces without scartching.
- Small crevice brushes for those hard to reach places like screw heads, toilet seat fittings , sink faucets , hinges, tracks and runners , plug holes and overspills .
- Detailing brush for delicate dusting of precious items.
- Spin mop for streak free high gloss tiles , hardwood floors, tiled floors , travertine tiles , and laminate flooring.
- Spin mop heads to change after every 30 foot of mopping
- Heavy duty bin bags
- Lightweight cordless vacuum cleaner like this one
- Color coded tooth brushes like these ones for those hard to reach places like screw heads, toilet seat fittings , sink faucets , hinges, tracks and runners , plug holes and overspills . I buy my toothbrushes in bulk, and I color-code them to know which ones are for which rooms. For extra cleaning power, I use them with heavy-duty cleaner or a cream cleaner if the area is easy to rinse.
Learn how to become a speed cleaner
How to speed clean a room
- Start at the door.
Begin at the door and work your way around the room in a clockwise direction until you reach the door again. When you’ve finished, move on to the next room. Cleaning in a clockwise way ensures that you do not keep going over the same area and cuts down on the number of steps you use to clean the room. A vast amount of time is wasted when you clean by going over the same areas, losing equipment, walking to and from the rubbish bin, starting another job before you’ve finished the first one, and missing areas, so you need to retrace your steps. Once you’ve learned how to do speed cleaning, you’ll soon notice how much more you can get done.
- Always work top to bottom.
Always work from top to bottom of the room, so you are not knocking dirt into areas you have already cleaned. cleaning in a methodical way also prevents you from cleaning the same area twice.
- Use a small stiff brush.
Use a small stiff brush like this one to clean in between furniture where the vacuum can’t reach. Cleaning between furniture this way will speed up your cleaning time and reduce the amount of heavy lifting you need to do.
- Vacuum bathrooms before cleaning.
Eliminate as much dust and hair as possible before getting everything wet by using a vacuum beforehand! Eradicating dust and hairballs makes it quicker and easier to clean the bathroom. once hair and dust get wet it sticks to every surface, it gets spread about with by the cloth and takes twice as long to clean.
- Remember to give disinfectants and sanitizers about 10-20 minutes of dwell time.
Disinfectants and sanitizers need about 10-20 minutes of dwell time to enable them to kill all the germs, check the manufacturer’s guidelines for the exact amount of dwell time required.
- Don’t oversoak the area with cleaning products.
you only need a small amount of cleaning product to get the surface clean. if you oversoak the surfaces it takes too much time to clean up.
Most areas, if they are cleaned regularly only need a small amount of cleaner to freshen up. - Don’t use a cream cleaner on hard to rinse areas.
cream cleaners are notoriously hard to rinse away so do not use on any area where water can not run freely. Save it for the inside of sinks, toilet bowls, baths, and showers or you will waste lots of time trying to remove the residue.
- Spot clean kitchen cupboard doors.
Spot clean kitchen cupboard doors, doors frames, and any areas that are prone to fingerprints. Spot cleaning rather than cleaning the whole surface saves a lot of cleaning time that could be spent cleaning other areas. if the whole area is dirty then of course it is important to clean it.
- Spot clean mirrors
Spot clean mirrors when you can, rather than cleaning the whole mirror. Cleaning mirrors and glass can take quite a while as you strive for a streak-free finish. you can cut down on cleaning time by only cleaning the dirty spots from the mirror.
- Use glass cleaner and glass cloth
Use glass cleaner and a glass cloth on chrome, tiles, and glass for a super shiny, streak-free finish. Learn how to clean windows without streaks in this post
- Wear an apron
Many of my clients have huge houses. I spent valuable cleaning time retracing my steps, looking for my tools, and going to my next job with half of my kit missing as I’d left it at the previous client’s house. I sometimes cleaned an area I’d already cleaned as I had no methodical way of working and seemed to be working on autopilot most of the time.
✔️ Wearing a speed cleaning apron will make a tremendous difference in how you clean your home because it allows you to carry all your tools around with you as you clean.
✔️ Wearing an apron stops you from having to retrace your steps to find things you’ve left in another room. It allows you to gather rubbish in your pockets to save time tracking back and forward to the bin.
✔️ Keeping your speed cleaner apron stocked with the correct cleaning tools needed in each room allows you to tackle any cleaning problem quickly and efficiently as you come across it rather than leaving the room to gather access to your tools.
✔️ If you ensure that you always keep all your tools in the same pocket each time you wear your apron, you will never waste time searching for stuff, and you will automatically grab what you need without even having to think about it.
✔️ Making sure you return all your tools to your apron after using them prevents you from constantly backtracking looking for lost equipment.
✔️ Keeping a pocket in your speed cleaning apron for all the rubbish you collect on the way saves many trips to the bin. I prefer to line my apron pocket with a plastic bag to hold all sorts of gunk I find under the kid’s beds.
✔️ If you can get used to putting things in the same place every time you use your apron, you’ll find that you’ll quickly reach for your tools automatically rather than search for lost items you have left in the last room you cleaned.
✔️ keeping a feather duster, and your cleaning fluid attached to your apron saves time and energy whilst cleaning. - Always carry the correct tools in your apron
You should only keep the products you need to clean your current room in your apron. Read this post if you’d like to know which products I keep in my cleaning kit at work and home!
Here are the house cleaning supplies I have in my speed cleaner apron when I am cleaning a kitchen:
✔️ A razor for cooker tops, ovens, and stoves. For a quick clean-up, I use the blade to scrape up hard gunky stuff from cookers, ovens, paint from windows, and soap scum from tiles.
✔️ A 1.5″ scraper. Before mopping and wiping, I use this tool to remove any dried-on food from the floors or countertops. Some clients have underfloor heating in kitchens, and when the kids spill raisins or food on it, the food gets cooked onto the heated floor and gets squished until it’s rock hard. The scraper is invaluable for speeding up these jobs, making it a quick clean.
✔️ Color-coded cloths, including a glass cloth for windows and polishing chrome and high-quality microfiber cloths. To find out more about how I color code my cloths read this post.
✔️ A non-scratch scrubby for any stubborn areas. I use the non-scratch scrubber for jobs a cloth can’t handle. I use mine with cream cleaner on sinks and on cookers, fridges, fingerprints, and floors to cut down on the elbow grease and help make it easy to clean.
✔️ A stainless steel scrubber. I use a stainless steel scrubber for removing baked-on food from dishes. I also use mine on my sink, cooker, oven, and floor but be warned, it does leave scratches!!
✔️ A pocket for collecting rubbish, lined with a small bag, for cleaning in a hurry.
✔️ Feather duster for cleaning cobwebs, dusting above door jams, for cleaning baseboards, and blinds. I tuck this through the side loop of my apron on the right-hand side to grab it quickly.
✔️ I stock my apron with whichever cleaning products I need for the duration of time it takes to clean the room and always have a spray bottle of degreaser and disinfectant cleaner in my caddy to use in each room. - Restock your apron after every room
After cleaning the first room you will need to empty your speed cleaner apron and restock it with products you need for the next room.
For example, if you were cleaning a bathroom, you would replace the scraper and the razor for some toothbrushes and a grout brush like this one. You would also need a bathroom sanitizer, a glass cleaner, and your bathroom cloths.
How to maintain a clean and tidy house.
If you need to follow a routine to keep your house clean, you might like to try our daily and weekly cleaning schedule.
- Go for a gadget! Kickstart your cleaning routine by setting the vacuum to run while at you are at work! This fantastic little gadget is fantastic for people with pets and gets all the hair and dust up while you relax!
- Leave a room better than you found it. Always leave a room better than you found it by tidying something up or putting something away before leaving the room. Just by doing this, you are speeding up your cleaning time every time you enter a room. I find this method works well in the garden too!
- Keep on top of paperwork. File paperwork immediately. It’s easy to leave mail sitting around for weeks. Create a filing system that makes it easy to file your bills and school papers quickly. See how I keep on top of school papers here.
- Make all the beds! Making your bed is an instant facelift for a messy room. I like to air my bed for half an hour by turning down the covers and opening the window, but always make it before leaving the house. Teach your little ones how to make their beds too! Find out how to make a bed like a professional housekeeper here.
- Put away laundry. Don’t wash it unless you’ve got time to dry it and put it away! When I am asked to organize a client’s home, one of the biggest problems I see is people struggling to control their laundry. Houses can be consumed by piles of laundry waiting to be processed. Find out how to stay on top of the laundry pile here.
- Delegate some jobs. My kids help with loading the laundry, recycling, and keeping their rooms and garden toys tidy. They have their washing baskets in their room and bring them down when I ask. They tidy their rooms before screen time twice a day. And they both take out the wheelie bins on bin day, as well as general day to day recycling. These small jobs help me keep on top of the other household chores and help keep a clean house. Click here to see how I get my kids to help out around the house and become mini speed cleaners!
- Put it away Put stuff away as soon as you’ve used it. The tidier you are, the more orderly other people will be! See how this trick works in this post!
- Keep the floor tidy. Keeping everything off the floor keeps your home chaos-free. Clear the table for the kids to play at and keep clothes off the floor.
FAQ
Often cleaning quickly means cutting corners. There are no cutting corners with the speed cleaning technique. In fact, you’ll soon find that you are doing a more thorough job in a much shorter time when you master speed cleaning.
The trick to becoming a speed cleaner is to be more productive with your time rather than to cut corners. If you continually cut corners when you clean your home, you’ll soon find that over time your house gets dirtier rather than cleaner as the build-up of dirt appears! Follow all the steps above to learn how to make better use of your time and energy.
You can become more productive by cutting down on the amount of time you waste, by becoming organized, and not having to retrace your steps continually. Create a clutter control routine to stay on top of household clutter and make cleaning time much more efficient.
If you are overwhelmed by the mess and unmotivated to clean read this post for some simple tips to help you get back on track and become a speed cleaner!
House cleaning aprons are available in all different shapes and sizes. I advise buying one which has all the following features.
✔️ Large pockets
✔️ Adjustable
✔️ Lightweight and flexible
Here is the one I use. I chose this apron for house cleaning because I can move quickly in it, it has ample pockets, protects me from spills, and adjusts, so it fits perfectly and doesn’t flop about when I’m bending down.
If you’d like to know more about becoming a speed cleaner and keeping a clean house, drop us a line in the comments below!