How to Avoid Cleaning Mistakes That Make a Home Dirtier - Top Tips

Whether you are a housesitter or a homeowner avoid cleaning mistakes by following these essential top tips to cleaning a home. By ensuring your follow these tips you will avoid making your home or residence dirtier than when you started cleaning. Read on to learn more.

Avoid Cleaning Mistakes That Make Your Home Dirtier – Top Tips

avoid cleaning mistakes by using clean materials — Avoid classic cleaning mistakes by using clean materials and clean water to start with, to ensure successful cleaning results

Photo by cottonbro studio

When we clean our homes, we often aim for the middle ground between efficiency and quality. However, many of these hacks can lead to our homes being dirtier than if we hadn’t bothered, especially if you don’t have cleaners Chelsea.

So, what are some of the biggest cleaning mistakes that are making your home dirtier? Let’s find out!

Cleaning Mistakes That Are Making Your Home Dirtier

1. Reusing Dirty Cloths

Perhaps the biggest mistake many people make is reusing the same cloth to clean different surfaces around the home. This is often the case with dusters and microfibre cloths used for hard surfaces, bathrooms, etc.

The trick here is to simply use different cloths. At the very least, you’ll want one cloth per room, which can then be changed and washed regularly. For particularly bacteria-ridden surfaces (i.e., toilets), consider using kitchen paper.

2. Forgetting High-Touch Surfaces

How often do you clean things like light switches and door handles? Probably not often enough! These are high-touch surfaces: things we interact with at least once a day. They can harbour bacteria and germs that we then spread throughout our homes.

Use a good anti-bac spray on high-touch surfaces at least every 2-3 days. Keeping them clean will reduce the risk of cross-contamination with other surfaces around your home.

3. Cleaning from the Ground Up

Cleaning your home in the most efficient way possible means starting at the top and working down, both in rooms and the house more generally. Dust and debris can get knocked off surfaces as you clean them, which creates mess on lower surfaces

So, start as high as possible in each room and work towards the floor, leaving the hoovering until last. This gives you the best chance of capturing all the dust you’ve kicked into the air while cleaning.

4. Not Cleaning with Clean Tools

Using dirty cleaning tools will massively impact the quality of your cleaning. While it’s less of an issue with a vacuum cleaner, it’s particularly obvious with sponges, cleaning rags, and mops. They can transfer both dirt and bacteria to surfaces you’re working on.

Get around this by regularly cleaning or replacing things. Sponges, for example, should be dried as quickly as possible and replaced every week or so. Old-school mops can be washed, while Swiffer-style mops should be replaced every couple of months.

5. Spraying Products Directly onto Surfaces

woman cleaning a white porcelain sink — Make sure you are methodical to avoid cleaning mistakes

Photo by Kaboompics.com

The only cleaning products you should spray directly onto a surface are anti-bac spray and glass cleaner. Everything else should really be sprayed onto your cleaning cloth before wiping the surface down.

Spraying directly onto the surface can lead to you using too much product, which can create a greasy or oily deposit. In turn, dust can stick to this, making things look even dirtier. This is particularly an issue with furniture polish due to its oily and waxy ingredients.

6. Storing Your Products in the Wrong Place

Storage instructions exist for a reason, and this is quite important for cleaning products. Storing them somewhere hot and humid (such as a bathroom) can cause key ingredients to break down. It can take a while for this to happen, but this becomes a risk for less commonly used cleaning products.

So, store them somewhere cool and dry. A kitchen cupboard is better than a bathroom if you’re short on space because at least temperature and humidity are typically lower there.

7. Forgetting About Contact Time

As mentioned, anti-bac spray is one of the only things you want to spray directly onto a surface. Why? Because of contact time, something it’s easy to forget about.

Contact time is the period required for the product to actually disinfect a surface and kill germs and bacteria. Spraying it on and then wiping it off straight away doesn’t give it long enough to actually work, meaning the bacteria is still there.

Contact time will vary by product, but 2 minutes is usually a safe bet. This might seem like a long time, but you can spray a surface and go do another job while it’s working. For example, spray the toilet and then clean any glass and mirrors in the bathroom while the anti-bac spray does its thing.

8. Using Dirty Water

This should be a fairly obvious one, but continuing to use dirty water when you’re cleaning things will spread bacteria around. You’ll find this is often the case with mopping, but can also happen when you’re washing down cupboards, the shower, and so on.

As with the other tips, this is a fairly easy one to solve: change your water regularly. With mopping, for example, it can be helpful to change the water after every room. This might seem excessive but it’ll help to avoid spreading dirt and bacteria.

Final Thoughts on Cleaning Mistakes That Make a Home Dirtier

The cleaning mistakes listed above are easy to make if you’re not thinking consciously about your cleaning processes. Luckily, once you’re aware of them, they’re easy to remedy and avoid because the tips above are all pretty easy things to do. Not making these mistakes should help you clean like a pro, so good luck!