Question for professional cleaners

[AmyAmoeba]

Given 3 hours in a four bedroom, reasonably sized house, where would you start, what would you do and how would you do it?

I don't know whether I'm just hopelessly slow, desperately inefficient or utterly incompetent but I can't compete with the job my cleaner used to do. I'm keeping on top of the daily maintenance but I miss that lovely dazzling look my house used to have once a week.

I never really learned much about keeping house growing up and I'm sure there must be an obvious order to follow, or little touches that make a big impact.

When you clean professionally you do get much speedier and more efficient (as I suppose with any job a person does numerous times).

My tips for speed are make sure you have everything you need right to hand before you start.

Clean when nobody else is using the house and complete ALL of one task throughout before moving on to another task for example, I always do the kitchen first, then bathrooms (these rooms are called the 'wet work' within the cleaning industry. Then I would go around dusting in all of the dry rooms and doing the windows etc, after that go around with the vacuum and finally mop over the hard floors (obviously having vacuumed them first).

If you get some sort of structure and routine going on you will get faster with time.

Having said that I'm not as young as I was, and even with 20 years cleaning experience I cannot clean nearly as quickly as when I was in my 20s and 30s. Your cleaning speed depends on all sorts of personal factors like that so you can't time it to perfection but I do still find that having your own routine and supplies to hand are the main keys to effective cleaning and efficiency.

Have a look at the Fly Lady site, it helps get you into a good routine.