How to Clean Your House in One Day

How to clean your house in ONE day – speed cleaning tips every busy mom needs to know.

Cleaning your entire house in one day can be a huge task, but it’s not impossible.

This is good news if you have company dropping by this evening and a house that is definitely not company-ready. Or, maybe you’ve just been putting your weekly cleaning tasks off for a few too many weeks and the mess is starting to catch up with you.

Whatever the case may be, learning these house cleaning tips and using the clean house in one day checklist found below the tips, will be well worth your time!

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Easy house cleaning tips

Before we jump to what order to clean your house in, let’s go over a couple simple house cleaning tips that will go a long way. Using these tips will significantly cut down on the amount of time it takes to complete each cleaning task and will make cleaning your house in one day possible. (If you want to learn how to clean your house in an hour, these tips are what you need.)

**1. Don’t use a timer**

I am a huge advocate of the timer method when it comes to cleaning.

(The timer method is simply setting a timer for a certain amount of time – usually between 10 to 45 minutes – and removing all distractions and doing nothing but CLEAN during that time. The timer method makes it easier to keep your focus and keep you on track because you know you don’t have to do this task forever, you can see the end drawing near.)

But, when it comes to cleaning your house in one day, the timer method isn’t the most efficient. Using a timer for cleaning works well when you spread your binge cleaning out over a couple of days, it allows you to take breaks and split the cleaning tasks into short stints so you don’t lose focus or do a sloppy job.

But, we’re trying to clean as quickly as we can here, so there’s no time for long breaks or for spreading the cleaning tasks out over a number of days.

So, for the sake of cleaning your entire house in a day or less, ditch your timer, roll up your sleeves, and get rid of any distractions. It’s going to be a long day of cleaning, but it will be very worth it once it’s done.

(Put your phone in a different room, turn off the TV, and shut down the computer. There’s no time to scroll social media today. Today is for cleaning.)

Download the FREE Deep Cleaning Checklist as a bonus for joining my newsletter: Printable Deep Cleaning Checklist for Every Room in Your House

2. Plan time

If you’re here, there’s a good chance that you want to clean your house TODAY. But, if it’s later in the day and you’re not going to be able to do everything from start-to-finish before the day’s end, you might want to consider planning this big house clean for another day.

Plan it for a day where you can start early in the morning and work late into the afternoon. A day where you can get everything done in one go, rather than splitting it up.

This step is to sit down and think of a day in the next week or two that you aren’t busy. A day you were planning to just stay home anyway. That’s your day – your day to clean.

Trust me, if you don’t plan a day to do this, you’ll simply read this post and think, “those are good ideas”, and it will go nowhere. You need to make a PLAN. Don’t just say this is something you want to do, actually do it.

3. Make a plan of attack

This is possibly the most important step in getting ready to clean your house in one day. Before you set out to clean, you need a plan of what you’re going to do.

If you don’t have a plan, you’ll find yourself floating around your house with cleaning supplies in hand not really getting anything done.

You’ll be exhausted by the end of the day because you were constantly running around doing stuff, but since you didn’t have a plan you would end up missing a lot of areas in your home and have to go back and clean the places you forgot about or missed the next day.

(Trust me – after this big clean you’re going to want to be able to relax the next day. Or show off your newly cleaned house. Up to you.)

So, sit down with a pen and paper and make a plan of attack. Jot down all the areas and rooms in your house that need to be cleaned, then write down what order you’ll clean them in. (If you don’t know what order is the most efficient, don’t worry, we’ll cover that in a bit.)

4. Gather your cleaning supplies

There’s not much worse than starting a major overhaul of your house only to realize that you’re all out of bathroom cleaner. Or you can’t find your cleaning gloves. Or your bathtub scrubbie has fallen apart and you don’t have a backup.

Then you have to halt the whole process – losing your momentum – to go to the store and pick up the cleaning supplies you’re missing.

Before you know it an hour has passed and you’re already behind schedule before you’ve even started cleaning.

Save yourself the hassle and gather all your cleaning supplies a day or two before your big house clean.

PS – not sure what cleaning supplies you’re going to need? See the whole list, here to make sure you have everything.

5. Work from top to bottom (always)

One thing you’re going to want to be sure of when you start cleaning is that you’re working from the top of your house down to the bottom, not the other way around.

If you’re just cleaning willy-nilly, you’ll be halfway through cleaning a room only to realize that you dusted the baseboards first, and are now knocking dust from the shelves on the wall back down onto the just-cleaned baseboards.

And then you’re going to have to go and grab your baseboard duster and dust all the baseboards again, creating far more work for yourself than is necessary.

6. Clean by task

There are two different ways you can clean:

By task
By room

Cleaning by task means bunching like-tasks together and doing them all at once. Cleaning by room means you would focus solely on one room or area of the house at a time before moving on to the next.

For example – when cleaning by task you would dust every surface in every room/area of your house.

When cleaning by room, you would dust just the surfaces that need to be dusted in the particular room you are in, then clean everything else in that room before moving on to another area of the house.

Most cleaning experts will recommend cleaning by tasks, while other’s recommend cleaning by room.

I believe that you can get a better, deeper, clean when you clean by room, but since we’re just focusing on cleaning the entire house, not necessarily deep cleaning, today, I believe that it is easier to clean by task when it comes to cleaning the whole house fast.

(You will do this by cleaning by task, then you will jump into each individual room of the house to finish cleaning up. We’ll talk more about this below!)

If you are interested in deep cleaning every room in your house, grab the deep cleaning checklist that has helped thousands of people deep clean their homes, here.

7. Start with the obvious messes

As you go into cleaning your whole house, you’ll want to clear some of the easy and obvious messes first.

These messes are things like – dishes piling up, laundry on the floor, cluttered tables and countertops.

Before you tackle your entire house, get rid of the obvious messes. Doing this will make cleaning the rest of your house a lot easier. When you go to clean the kitchen, you won’t be faced with a stack of dishes a mile high on top of all the other kitchen cleaning tasks you have to do.

When you go to clean the living room, you won’t have to work your way around the clutter if you clean it up beforehand.

Take a bit of time (you could even do this the day before your big house clean) and clear the easy, obvious messes. Wash and put away the dishes (be sure to gather dishes that have gone astray in other rooms of the house), put clutter where it belongs, and pick the laundry up off of the floor.

Then you’re ready to tackle the rest of your house, task by task.

Now that you’re equipped with the house cleaning tips you need to make this a speedy house clean, you’ve got your plan of attack and all your cleaning supplies are ready and waiting to be used, and you’ve cleared dishes, laundry, and clutter, it’s time to start.

Here we will go through how to clean the different rooms in your house in one day. We will go over each room in the house and what needs to be done in those rooms, and once you’ve read through it you can then bunch the tasks together (do all the dusting in one go, rather than room-by-room, clean all the floors at once, strip all the linens, etc.)

Remember – wherever you are working in your house, always work from the top of the room to the bottom so you don’t create any unnecessary work for yourself.

How to clean the house fast and easy

Bathrooms

I find it easiest to do all the bathrooms at once, rather than one at a time. I like to go around and spray all the counters, showers, mirrors, and toilets, then go back around and wipe them down starting with the first one that got sprayed.

Spray countertops, shower/tub, mirror, and toilet with this specific cleaner
Put toilet bowl cleaner in toilets
Wipe counters, tubs, and toilets, wipe mirrors and faucets with this cloth. Clean toilet bowls
Replace hand and bath towels

Bedrooms

Start off by stripping the beds and putting the linens into the washing machine (don’t turn it on just yet, wait until you’ve got the linens from all the beds, bathroom towels, and kitchen hand towels to put in one or two loads)
Remake the beds
Wipe down furniture and surfaces with a microfiber cloth and all-purpose cleaner
Tidy night tables
Put clothes in the hamper or away in closet

Living room

Put out-of-place items back into place
Dust ceiling fan
Dust blinds with a blind duster
Dust all other surfaces

Office

Dust all surfaces
Organize desk
Get rid of paper clutter

Kitchen

Clear counters and table of anything that doesn’t belong
Wipe counters and table
Wipe stovetop
Wipe down appliances (use your mirror cloth along with this stuff to remove pesky marks and fingerprints from stainless steel appliances)
Wash and put away dishes
Replace hand towels and dishcloth

Floors and garbage

Lastly, go into each room of the house and take out all the garbages. Then, vacuum and mop all the floors. Work strategically and vacuum all the carpets first, then move on to all the hard floors (to eliminate any time wasted switching back and forth from carpet to hard floor vacuum heads).

Now go around and do a quick mop of all the hard floors in your house. (If you want to save time with vacuuming and mopping, consider getting one of these to cut the time spent cleaning floors in half.)

There you have it – your cleaning house checklist to show you how to clean house fast and easy – everything to do to clean your house in one day!

If you were looking for something more in-depth and were wondering how do you deep clean a house, you can find my house deep cleaning checklist, here.

If you have some favorite quick house cleaning tips that you’d like to share, feel free to do so below!