Keeping on top of deep cleaning the house

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I'd say we're generally pretty clean & tidy

Our house is always (just about) visitor ready. We never let dirty dishes accumulate. We wipe the counters before & after every food prep.

We have a cat so we keep on top of hoovering due to her hairs.

It seems orderly. However i had yesterdsy off work & decided to deep clean our bedroom. Omg! Once i started looking at the skirting boards & the edges where the wall meets the ceiling, in the corners, behind stuff erc - seriously, the dust & cobweb levels were shocking

Today I'm tackled the bathroom. Again sink, toilet & bath cleaned v regularly but when I pulled out the storage unit for products! Again dusty, hairy, just generally filthy

I work full time, so does dh. We both do equal amounts of cleaning but somehow we're obviously not keeping on top of it all.

I don't want to spend all weekend every weekend deep cleaning! I need down time too

how do you all manage it?

Ultimately I want to enjoy my home tje way i love being in a hotel. I want to get it to that level & then keep it like that. I feel I'm missing some vital method or system..

We don't have a cleaner.

i feel as if my flat is too cluttered to get a cleaner in. I work ft from home, have autistic and ADHD DD16 here 24/7 too plus pets. The flat is small with very little storage and I seem to be on constant declutter but there’s never enough space. I have ADHD and am a terrible procrastinator too which doesn’t help. Along with some chronic pain issues which mean I’m always so tired.

Life is too short to worry about housework.

I have a cleaner that comes once a month to do the jobs I just haven’t got time to do.
she does the
woodwork
inside windows
ovens
fridge
shutters
kitchen cupboards
once every 3 months she moves the furniture and does underneath.
i love her, she’s a massive help.

Crikey, I didnt expect this thread to lead to such vitriol!

I have a very busy life with work, family, travel, art etc etc. I don't spend my life with the marigolds on, hence my reason for posting in the first place!!

I've really enjoyed reading everyone's approach to this & I think realistically we'll comtine this 'deep clean' that we've started & then we'll probably revert to type and just keep up our weekly usual routine for about 6 months

On the plus side, we're getting through some serious de-cluttering, I'm £150 up from the loose change i found & I've figured out some new storage solutions which will also make our lives easier so it's win win really 😀

Where does all the dust actually come from. I do our bathroom floor in the morning and by night there is a layer of dust over it. Is it from toilet roll? It drives me insane.

Yes I think loo roll in the bathroom, also (sorry for the mental image...) dead skin cells from towels, probably.

Plus if you have a window open you'll get pollen and/or car exhaust particles and dust in from outside depending on what faces your window.

Pet hair/dander if you have a pet. Dust/particles/hair/etc from people's clothing when you take your trousers down to use the loo.

I always wondered why bathrooms are so dusty but I think it's all of that.

You're my idol.

My Mum ran a house like that. Spotless behind the sofa etc. It was shit to live in.

doing the cutlery draw.....all cutlery in dishwasher or in a bowl of hot soapy water, rinsed hot and allowed to air dry. Remove draw and orgainser ans wipe with damp cloth. Replace when everything dry. Allow to air dry. Active time taken around 10 minutes.

loo roll and excellent towels.

Nah I can’t be fucked with that. My house is basically clean but I am messy. I don’t care, it’s clean enough for me! As long as it’s not a health hazard why make boring work for yourself.

Where are you getting towels from? I want nice fluffy ones. That stay soft after a wash

It sounds like you live in a perfectly normal clean house. I think very few people are pulling out all their furniture and dusting skirting boards every week. If you have kids and pets it's unlikely you'll live in a show home clean house unless you literally spend all the time you're not at work cleaning.

Having less stuff obviously makes it easier to keep the house clean. However, unless you like the very minimal look, you may have to adjust your expectations in line with how much 'stuff' you like to have on show to make your house feel homely.

I think it's easy to become a bit obsessive over cleaning. My retired neighbour is always hoovering and making busy work for herself. She's also a miserable old coot who's always picking at the neighbours if they have weeds in their garden or don't cut their grass one week. I think I'd rather have a lived in house and a life, rather than being a miserable lonely curtain twitcher with an immaculate house and garden!

best ones I have found are marks BUT I have got a whole house water softener and THAT is the gamechanger

I have a cleaner come do the basics for 3 hours every 2 weeks and in between I keep on top of the deeper clean areas that need attention, otherwise would never keep on top of it!
If you have the budget I'd 100% recommend.

Now then. I choose to only pay someone else to do something I cannot. Plumbing would be an example - but cleaning would not be an example. So no cleaner here.
We pull a good shift every evening to keep things nice eg hoovering up cat hair, folding and putting away all laundry, making and clearing up from dinner. Kids have specific jobs eg bins, emptying of dishwasher.
But deep cleaning? No time for that unless I want to spend no time after work with DH or DC. Or give up exercise. Or eat processed food instead of home cooked meals. Skirting board dusting and all the mirrors and the door frames and all that jazz only gets done once every couple of months. It’s not important enough to do weekly in my view.

This sounds normal to me. Like you, I keep on top of the surface stuff from day to day and I don’t like clutter so tidy as I go about the house. I’ve got a robot vac which I run most days upstairs and down. Other very regular jobs are wiping kitchen surfaces; cleaning bathroom sinks and loos.

Showers probably get cleaned once a week; bathroom and kitchen floors mopped once or twice a week. Skirting boards and cobwebs get done once or twice a month.

But as for actually moving furniture to hoover, cleaning windows, dusting behind radiators, dusting blinds and lampshades etc- I just do those as and when I notice how bad they’ve got.😂 I recently cleaned a lampshade which had got very dusty- I think that was the first time I’d done it and I’ve had it about ten years 😳 In my defence, it is fabric and you couldn’t tell until you got up close how dusty it was! These are the sorts of things I just have a blind spot for. Overall I’m happy with what I’m doing. It takes up a few hours a week and I don’t want to do any more than that- the house is clean enough.

Can you recommend a dust free loo roll ?

I absolutely love a spotless house, and in my experience the easiest way to keep it that way (or near to it) is to have as little ‘stuff’ as possible. So decluttering ftw. It’s easier when the kids move out!

I’d love to repaint. I’d choose the absolute best, top of the range stuff that you can wipe clean without damaging the paintwork.

One thing I’ve found helps is leaving heavy things like bookcases or wardrobes pulled out just enough that I can get the hoover behind them to hoover. This also helps with air flow to stop mould behind them.

With most heavy stuff I can’t pull it out myself, I would need help, so having everything pulled out slightly already and not dead against the walls makes it much easier. I do need to get all the toys out from under my kids’ beds and hoover under there properly though, been avoiding that job for a while aaargh

Life is too short to worry about deep cleaning! I do it maybe once or twice a year, sometimes less. Who actually cares? When did "deep cleaning" become a thing anyway, it used to be called spring cleaning - which indicates a once a year job.

I'm retired and live alone, with no family, and have far more interesting things to do with my life (even if it's just spending days hours on MN) to be twitching curtains or having an immaculate house and garden. In fact I probably do less housework than I did when I worked. How sad for someone to have nothing more interesting to do.

Some people are happy living in a pigsty OP, some don't bare minimum and others are OCD, whats important is doing what works for you.

I love a clean home and am jealous hearing about your newly painted walls and woodwork.

I've been in hime that were so filthy you didn't want to touch anything, and some that are so sterile, you're afraid to drop a crumb.

Cleaning wise, it's an ongoing thing, but the satisfaction is rewarding.

I'm good at cleaning as I go and will get the itch to do a deep clean every 3 or so months.
Probably should declutter as would make things so much easier.
Sounds like you're doing great .

How sad to be so judgy about other people's choices.