This Is the Best Strategy for Cleaning Your Whole House.

Cleaning in any order is always better than not cleaning at all, but there are ways to make it more effective. If you clean your home in the wrong order, you risk creating a mess in areas you’ve already taken care of. But what is the correct order?

Clean with chemicals first

Many cleaning services advocate a chemical-first approach to cleaning, and there are several reasons for this: First, many cleaning solutions require prolonged contact with surfaces to work properly, whether to disinfect or remove debris. Secondly, using cleaning chemicals can be dangerous if you are not knowledgeable or focused. In 2020 , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one in three adults used chemicals or disinfectants unsafely while cleaning during the pandemic. You don’t want to be working with chemicals after a long day of cleaning; you want to do this when you’re just starting out and your mind is sharp. Always wear protective gloves and read bottle instructions—and never mix chemicals .

Start with the bathroom, which takes the longest to clean despite its small size, as it has the most germs. If you’re using a cleaning solution that needs to sit for a while, you can turn on the fan, leave the door open, and walk out of there while it runs. Turn on the fan no matter what to make sure you’re not breathing in anything harmful when you walk past the room again. Say, after pouring bleach into the toilet and leaving it for a while, you can return to the bathroom and perform a non-chemical cleaning.

Then go to the kitchen and do the same. Think about how you can have your tools clean for you while you do other tasks, like doing laundry, soaking dishes, or leaving disinfectant on a surface for a while.

Dust before organization

As long as your chemicals are working for you or your bathroom and kitchen are sanitized to your liking, it’s time to dust off. You may have to clean up and organize things first, but this can make things harder in the long run: You should always dust from top to bottom, hitting the tops of windows and doors, as well as the ceiling and fan, before anything else. . Dust from there and everywhere else will eventually settle lower, so if you tidy up the room before dusting, you’ll actually be making it dirty again.

Dust first, so when you vacuum and tidy up, you’ll pick up all the dust right away. (The floors are actually the last ones, though, so wait for now.)

Clean up after dusting

Now it’s time to put things in order. At this point, you can use a cleaning method called the “five things” technique , where you move around the room, picking up all the trash, and then picking up all the laundry again. On the third pass, take all the dishes that are in the room, and on the fourth, pick up and put away everything that has space. Your final tour of the room should be to pick up anything that doesn’t have a place, but once you’ve put trash, laundry, dishes, and other things in their place, you should have plenty of room for those mystery items.

If you find something that needs chemical cleaning or dusting, you can go back and do it while you move on to the next room.

Clean floors last

Once everything is disinfected, cleaned and put in order, you can start cleaning the floors. This will get rid of any falling dust, but waiting until the end will also ensure that you don’t back away and step on wet hardwood or untouched vacuum lines.

The purpose of cleaning in a specific order is to ensure that you don’t have to clean certain areas twice. For best results with this schedule, move from room to room so you don’t go to different steps in each room.