Learning how to properly clean a room is about more than wiping down surfaces and vacuuming the floor. The order you clean in can make the difference between getting the job done efficiently and accidentally creating more work for yourself.
In Lesson 2, you learned how to reset a messy room by removing trash, sorting misplaced belongings, putting things away, and turning the room into a functional space. Now that the clutter is out of the way, you’re ready for the next skill: Cleaning the room.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:
- Properly clean a room from top to bottom
- Decide what order to clean in
- Know what you can leave for another day
- Recognize when the room is finished.
Step 1: Reset the Room Before You Clean It
If you haven’t already reset the room, do that first.
This is why we separated resetting from cleaning in Lesson 2. Trying to clean around toys, clothes, dishes, papers, and other belongings makes the job harder than it needs to be. You have to keep moving things to reach the surfaces underneath them. That doesn’t mean the room needs to look perfect before you begin. It simply means the trash is gone, belongings have been returned to their places, and the room is back to a functional state.
When the average person cleans, it’s natural to reset before cleaning without even realizing it. I’m simply giving a name to what you already are doing to show you that there are separate steps involved in cleaning. Once you get the hang of it, resetting the room first and cleaning it second will start to come naturally.
Step 2: Decide What Needs Cleaning
Before you grab a bottle of cleaner and start spraying, look around.
What is actually dirty?
Maybe there’s dust on the furniture, fingerprints on the glass door, crumbs on the coffee table, pet hair on the couch, or dirt on the floor. Maybe the room hasn’t been cleaned in a while and most of it needs attention.
This is an important habit to start developing because cleaning a room doesn’t mean you have to clean every single thing in it every time.
For example, today I walked into my bathroom and noticed little bits of cat litter near the sink. One of my children had changed and left their pants on the bathroom floor, one of the kids apparently thought it would be fun to finger paint with water while brushing their teeth, there was a smear of toothpaste on the sink, and the trash was nearly full.
This is an example of a room that needs to get reset and cleaned. But, it doesn’t take as long as you might think. Once you start working in a way that maximizes your time—and understand that not everything needs to get done at once, every time—cleaning and maintaining your home becomes much easier.
If a shelf isn’t dusty, you don’t need to dust it just because a cleaning checklist tells you to. If the windows are clean, leave them alone. If the floor needs vacuuming but doesn’t need mopping, don’t mop it just because someone else’s checklist says to mop on Monday.
This is why it is important to develop a plan for your own home, not follow someone else’s plan for theirs.
Look at the room in front of you and decide what needs your attention today.
Step 3: Gather What You Need
Once you know what you will be cleaning, gather the supplies you’ll need before you begin.
Depending on the room you might need:
- rags
- a duster
- cleaner
- a vacuum
- a broom
- a mop.
You don’t need to bring every cleaning product you own into the room. Bring what you will need for the jobs you have identified.
For example: For the bathroom I was just speaking about, I brought in my homemade all-purpose cleaner and paper towels, and my homemade cleaning wipes. I also set the broom and dust pan outside the door to keep it out of the way.
My all-purpose cleaner handles most of the cleaning in my own home, from windows and counters, to sinks, tubs, and some floors. If your prefer a cleaner with bleach, you can also try my Disinfecting Bleach Cleaner.
Bringing supplies before you start helps prevent the same problem we talked about during a room reset: leaving the room and getting distracted.
You walk into the kitchen to grab a cleaning cloth and notice dishes in the sink, start to load the dishwasher, then notice something on the counter that belongs upstairs, and suddenly you’ve abandoned the room you were cleaning.
Gather your supplies first so that once you start, you can stay focused on the job in front of you.
Step 4: Start High and Work Down
If there’s one rule that will make cleaning easier, it is this:
Start high and work your way down.
There’s a simple reason for it. Dust and debris fall. If you vacuum the floor first then dust the bookshelf, that dust may end up on the freshly vacuumed floor. If you sweep under the kitchen table then clean the table, crumbs from the table will fall back to the floor and you will have to sweep for a second time.
Instead, start with the highest area that needs cleaning and gradually work your way toward the floor.
That might mean dusting a ceiling fan before a dresser, or cleaning shelves before the table under it. That doesn’t mean you have to clean the top of every doorway every time you clean. Remember: Clean what actually needs cleaning.
We’re simply working in order so you aren’t cleaning the same area twice.
Step 5: Choose a Starting Point and Work around the Room
I like to call this method the ClockWise Method. Choose where you will begin.
It doesn’t matter what your starting point is. You can start at the doorway, in the farthest corner, or at the nightstand. What matters is that once you start, you continue working around the room in a ClockWise direction instead of bouncing back and forth from one place to another. Very WISE indeed!
Clean one area then move to the next.
If you start at the bookshelf, clean what needs attention there, then move to the furniture beside it. Continue around the room until you eventually return to where you started.
This gives you a simple path to follow and makes it much easier to see what you’ve already cleaned.
you don’t have to remember whether you wiped the table or dusted the shelf because you’re not jumping back and forth across the room.
Eventually, you’ll probably develop a natural path through each room in your home and you won’t even have to think about it.
One thing I like about the ClockWise Method is that it shifts your focus to one area of the room at a time, instead of the whole room at once. This helps prevent overwhelm and allows you to move more efficiently because you’re only thinking about the area in front of you.
Short Recap:
- Start with a reset
- Quickly observe the room to see what cleaning products and supplies you need
- Choose a starting point and use my ClockWise Method
- Start high and work your way down
Step 6: Clean Surfaces
As you are working around the room, clean the surfaces that need attention. Depending on the room, that might include tables, counters, shelves, windowsills, desks, dressers, nightstands, or other furniture.
Pay attention to what each surface is made from. The same cleaner that is appropriate for multi-surfaces might not be okay on wood. So, use products and cleaning methods that are safe for the surface you are working on. If you make my all-purpose cleaner, because it contains alcohol, it can’t be used on wood. keep this in mind as you are cleaning.
This is another place it is easy to get sidetracked.
You open a drawer to wipe the handle and notice the drawer is a mess. You move something on a bookshelf and decide the entire shelf would look better reorganized. I’m the queen of being guilty of this. It wasn’t until I realized that my method wasn’t working that things began to change.
Cleaning would turn into organizing. What started as a 10-minute job became something I couldn’t finish because I’d empty drawers and start reorganizing. You can imagine how long a single room took when I tried to reset, organize, declutter, and clean it all at once. I once spent 12 hours in my daughter’s room!
So, STOP trying to do it all at once! It’s exhausting!
All of those jobs are worth doing, but they’re different jobs. Make a note of them and continue cleaning.
Right now, you’re removing dirt, dust, crumbs, fingerprints, spills, pet hair, and whatever else makes the room dirty.
Remember: Flat surfaces collect dust, even tops of picture frames
Step 7: Pay Attention to the High Touch Areas
There are some areas in our homes that we touch constantly without actually noticing them.
- Light switches
- Door handles
- drawer pulls
- cabinet knobs
- remotes
- banisters and more.
Again, you don’t need to scrub every handle in your house every time you clean. You’re learning to notice which ones actually need attention.
The light switch in a busy kitchen may get dirty much faster than one in a guest bedroom. The remote your family uses every night may need cleaning more frequently than an item that is rarely touched.
These little observations are going to become important later when we begin figuring out how often different areas of your home actually need to be cleaned.
Helpful Tip:
At this point I remove the wash rags, all the cleaner I have used., bring out the trash and any other miscellaneous items that need to come out from my cleaning supplies. The only thing left is what I need to clean the floor, like the mop and solution,
At this point I also light a candle or turn the oil diffuser on. My new favorite are the scent plug ins. I bought one for each room about a month ago and the house constantly smells amazing. Whichever you like start it up before you mop.
Step 8: Clean the Floor Last
The floor comes last for a reason. By the time you’ve dusted, and cleaned everything above it, any crumbs, dust, pet hair, or other debris you’ve knocked down has ended up on the floor.
Now, you can remove it all at once. Vacuum carpeting and rugs as needed. Sweep or vacuum hard flooring, making sure to get areas that tend to collect dirt. If the floor needs mopping, mop after you have removed loose debris.
One of my favorite homemaking tools is my wet vac. It is the most amazing thing. It vacuums the dirt and mops at the same time, my floors have never been so clean, and it cuts down on the amount of time I am cleaning.
You do not need to mop every time you clean. If you choose to mop once a week and that works for that room, then you do not need to do it more than that. If its every two weeks then that is what works best in your home. Remember, this is not what works best in my home, or on some famous Pinterest lady’s home that gave you her free printable of her weekly checklist for her house. It isn’t realistic, and that’s why it never works.
A kitchen where food is prepared may need more frequent mopping than a bedroom. A mudroom during “mud season” here in Vermont may need mopping once every other day, where as during the summer I could sweep everyday and mop once a week.
This is about you observing your room and deciding how often it needs to be cleaned and what works in your home.
But What About the Baseboards, Windows, and Everything Else?
This is where a regular cleaning session can turn into a three-hour project.
You finish the floor and notice that the baseboards are dusty. While you’re looking at the baseboards, you notice there is an ominous smudge on the wall. Then you look up and realize that there is a child’s hand print on the window. While your cleaning the windows, you realize how long it has been since you have washed the drapes.
Before you know it, you’re deep cleaning the entire room.
There is nothing wrong with cleaning any of those things when they need it. The problem is feeling as though every one of them has to be done every time you clean the room. They don’t.
Some jobs need to be done frequently. Others may only need to be done on occasion. We learn to manage those deeper-cleaning jobs separately.
For now, we’re learning how to properly clean a room without allowing every cleaning session to grow into something much bigger than it needs to be.
How Do You Know When You’re Done?
This is an important homemaking skill. You need to learn when to stop. I strive for perfection. Its a blessing and a curse. I had to learn to STOP. I was literally trying to do it all and I was burning out, and fast. Maybe you can relate? I would look at a room, I would NEED to reset it, clean it, deep clean it, organize, declutter, and donate things all in one day. That isn’t feasible.
Look around the room. The clutter has been reset. The surfaces that needed attention are clean. The dust, dirt, crumbs, and debris have been removed. The floor has been cleaned. Is the room comfortable to use? If yes, then you are done.
It is okay if things are not perfect. Deep cleaning is not part of today’s job. A clean room does not have to be a perfectly deep-cleaned room.
Knowing the difference will save you an enormous amount of unnecessary work over time, and a lot of stress and exhaustion.
What Did This Room Teach You?
Just like we did in Lesson 1 and 2, we’re going to stop and pay attention before moving on. What actually needed cleaning in this room?
Maybe you discovered that the floor gets dirty much faster than everything else. Perhaps the coffee table constantly collects crumbs and fingerprints. Maybe you expected the entire room to need dusting but only a few surfaces needed attention.
Ask Yourself:
- What was the dirtiest part of the room?
- What didn’t need cleaning at all?
- What seems like it will need frequent attention?
- What doesn’t need to be cleaned as often?
- Did you notice any deeper-cleaning jobs that need to be done eventually?
- Was there anything that needed to get done that you skipped because you dreaded doing it?
Write down anything that stands out to you, we are not creating a cleaning schedule yet. Right now, you’re learning what your home actually needs and how to properly clean a room, so that when we do create a routine, it will be based on your home instead of somebody else’s.
Why We’re Not Using a Pre-made Cleaning Schedule
You may have noticed that I haven’t told you to dust every Tuesday, mop every Thursdays and wash your windows once a month, or scrub your baseboards every two weeks.
That’s intentional. A cleaning schedule can be extremely helpful, but only when the schedule matches the home it’s being used in.
- A household with young children may need to clean certain areas much more frequently than another household
- Pets change what needs to be cleaned
- If you live on a farm, or in a city it will change how often things need to be done
- The number of people who live in your home matters.
- The season matters
- How you use each room matters
Even two homes with the same number of people can have completely different needs. That’s why we’re not starting with a schedule.
- First, you’re learning about your home.
- Then we’ll build the schedule around it.
That is very different from downloading someone else’s checklist and trying to keep up with a routine that was never designed for your household in the first place.
Lesson 3 Assignment
Choose the same room you worked with in Lesson 2 if possible. Reset it first if it needs it. Then clean the room using the method you learned in this lesson.
Before you begin:
- Decide what actually needs cleaning
- Gather your supplies.
- Choose a starting point and move around the room
- Start high and work your way down
- Clean the surfaces and high touch areas that need attention,
- Then finish with the floor.
The most important part of the assignment happens while you are cleaning.
- What gets dirty?
- What wasn’t dirty?
- Which job took the most time?
- Which job was the fastest
You may notice that the floor needs much more attention than the furniture, or that one surface gets dirty faster than everything else. You might also discover that some of the things you thought you needed to clean didn’t actually need cleaning yet.
If you notice a deeper-cleaning job that needs to be done eventually, write it down instead of automatically adding to today’s cleaning.
Keep those notes with what you’ve already learned in Lessons 1 and 2. You’re starting to collect the information you’ll need to create a cleaning routine that fits your home.
What’s Next?
You’ve now learned how to identify problem areas in your home, reset a room that has gotten out of order, and properly clean it once the clutter is out of the way.
Now it’s time to start putting those skills together.
In Lesson 4, we’ll use what you’ve been noticing about your home to begin creating a simple cleaning routine.
Instead of following a pre-made schedule, you’ll learn how to decide what needs to be cleaned, how often it needs your attention, and where those tasks fit into your life.
The goal isn’t to create a perfect cleaning schedule. It’s to create one you can actually keep up with.
Don’t Miss the Next Lesson
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when the next lesson in the FREE Homemaking Skills Course is available, along with other helpful homemaking posts from Green Mountain Homestead.
