The Daily Clean
The Daily Clean came about in my house because:
it was spring and my dog had started moulting (she’s a black labrador - it’s a problem)
I had more time because a big work project had finished
we were repainting, so some rooms were getting the deep clean treatment
I had done a lot of decluttering and surfaces were emptier and easier to clean
The Daily Clean is a ‘concept’ in my mind. In the minds of my husband and son (the boys) it’s possibly more of an ‘encumbrance.’
It hit me that my freshly-painted, dog-hair-free rooms could probably be kept looking nice if I whipped a duster and vacuum round them every day (and regularly touched up any marks on the walls and skirting boards). I thought that maybe dusting an already clean room wouldn’t take long. I tried it out and it was a revelation!
I applied the ‘concept’ to the whole house and ran round like a nut-case dusting everywhere, every day. It was so quick and easy that I decided to add in cleaning the sinks, worktops, basins and loos. (By the way, when I say basins, I mean the ones in the bathrooms that lots of people call sinks - you do you, so call them what you like. To me sinks are places where you wash things rather than people.) But I digress - adding in wiping sinks, basins, worktops and loos that I now call ‘sanitising’ (quicker to say) was also surprisingly easy. The next step was to add in tidying and vacuuming. You can probably imagine that my step counter didn’t know what had hit it!
Back to dusting for a minute. The reason that I thought that it would be easy to dust every day is that I bought a feather duster in the supermarket. To be honest, I bought the neutral-coloured feather duster because I was putting a row of hooks in my utility room and I wanted the things hanging on it to match (I know - I’m blushing).
Once I had the duster hanging on my nice rack, I realised that using it for actual dusting (not just as an accessory) would mean that I could dust more quickly because:
I wouldn’t have to move things to dust around them
I could reach higher things (like the top of door frames) that were previously hard to get to
I would be able to dust spots that previously required a cloth
I could dust frequently and therefore prevent a build up of dust
The dog hair that had somehow (seriously - how???) floated onto the windowsills could be easily removed and relocated to its proper place (the floor - ready to be vacuumed away).
It worked like a charm. Seriously, within days, my house was noticeably less dusty and consequently easier to keep clean. Dusting daily means that even on day two, there’s less to do - the effect is cumulative. Best of all, this cumulative effect also works for vacuuming, tidying and sanitising. Yay!
I continued to clean daily, adding in the extra jobs as I got into the habit and I started to be able limit the time I spent on each task (cumulative benefits - see above). Over time, I developed a routine that meant I could do the work on autopilot (my totally favourite way of doing most things) and listen to podcasts at the same time.
After a few weeks of this crazy new regime, my house was much cleaner and tidier than usual and my thoughts were turning to the sustainability of this new system:
Q1. Can I be arsed to keep doing this?
Q2. Will I still be able to do it when I start my next big work project?
Q3. Who can I get to do it instead of me?
And so the idea of the daily clean was conceived….
I floated the idea to the boys that it’s not actually MY job to clean the house and they could work with me to split the work and make it even more manageable. I honestly expected much more resistance than I got (hardly any). I suspect the fact that I’d been very visibly (it was in lockdown and we were all at home) doing the work myself made all the difference. You know - model the good behaviour, be the change you want to see. All that.
The boys, on whom I experiment mercilessly, are the daily clean team (and me - I’m not wholly unreasonable) and we split the cleaning between the broad tasks of dusting, vacuuming and sanitising. We do this regularly. We aim for most days.
We rotate the tasks - that way the jobs that the boys prefer to do (they think they’re easier because they don’t do them properly) get done right every so often (by me).
I do the tidying myself before we start because it’s usually very quick and it’s easier to split three main tasks between three people - basic maths. We work for half an hour and then we stop. It has to be an amount of time that means we (they) can be bothered to do it again tomorrow.
It works because
you don’t have to do it every day - if you do it often, the house stays pretty clean and is never so embarrassing that you can’t invite anyone in. If you do it fairly often it doesn’t matter when you have to skip it.
you don’t have to do everything - you can split it up across a couple of days or more.
if you miss something it doesn’t matter because you’ll catch it next time.
when you divide the work by task rather than by room, you get into a rhythm and stay focused - you don’t have to keep swapping from duster to vacuum cleaner and it’s harder to get distracted when you have one task. I clean everything in the same order every time so that I’m less likely to miss anything. When I used to work room by room, I was constantly forgetting what I’d done.
limiting the time you spend makes It’s easier to focus and get on with the job - you know you’re going to be finished and doing something more interesting soon. Cleaning a whole house is a mind-numbing process - it’s so much easier to just do one, clearly-defined job such as cleaning bathrooms. You don’t have to spend half an hour - if you spend 10 minutes, you’ll make progress by doing it regularly.
The daily clean (which doesn’t have to be daily - we now call it the ‘half-hour clean’) is at the heart of our cleaning system. Obviously, there are lots of jobs that have to be done periodically that aren’t covered by the daily clean - that’s where my deep clean schedule comes in. That’s probably another blog post but it’s how I get all the other cleaning jobs done, things like wiping out kitchen cupboards, cleaning windows, washing woodwork and so on.
The combination of the daily clean and the deep clean schedule is the idea behind my Housability cleaning system and the services I offer at Housability. It has honestly changed my life!