If you’re like me, most of your apartment cleaning gets saved for the weekend. I’m a big fan of the closing shift method and try to give my space a light touch-up every night before bed, but living with my partner and a cat means my closing shift method isn’t enough. I always have to dedicate time to cleaning on the weekends.
Luckily, my partner and I agree to split the work evenly, so that makes cleaning a lot easier. But with all the nooks and crannies that dust and our cat’s messes get into, cleaning 700 square feet of space can still be a lot of work for two people. Here’s how we get it done in under two hours.
Work in Zones
With two people cleaning the apartment at once, we break our apartment into zones so we don’t get in each other’s way. My zones are typically the kitchen and bathroom, while my partner works on the bedroom and living room.
The dining area and entryway are the only spaces we clean together, and those are normally left for last since it’s such a small amount of space—but this is our way of meeting in the middle at the end (literally).
If you live by yourself, breaking down your home into zones that need similar types of cleaning (like the bathroom and kitchen) can make the overall process feel much less daunting.
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Play to Your Strengths
Cleaning isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and sometimes the mental hurdle of thinking about cleaning that one thing you hate takes much longer to get over than the actual cleaning itself.
That’s why we’ve broken the apartment into places that we feel most comfortable cleaning, making it easier for us to use our own preferred cleaning methods to get the job done quicker.
Even though the bedroom is my partner’s zone to clean, I’m much faster with making the bed so I’ll do that eventually once he’s out of the room. I’m not a fan of having to lift things to clean under them, so it’s my partner’s job to move things (like our bathroom storage tower) off the floor to make it easier for me to clean under them. We play to our strengths to make the cleaning faster.
Work Smarter, Not Longer
I work smarter by applying cleaning solutions on the tub, bathroom sink, toilet, stove top, and kitchen sink in quick succession. While the cleaners sit, I move on to other tasks in the area that don’t require waiting, like dusting, moving clean dishes from the dishwasher to the cabinets, cleaning the bathroom mirror, etc.
The cleaners have time to really do their work, and then my tub, sink, toilet, and stovetop only need a quick wipe-down or rinse after all all other tasks have been completed. There’s no need for lengthy scrubbing (except for in the case of burnt food on my stove).
Move Top to Bottom
You’d be surprised at how much extra work you create by doing things in the wrong order. If you sweep, vacuum, or mop your floor first and then clean off higher surfaces, there’s a high chance you’re knocking dirt and debris right back down to your freshly cleaned floor.
To prevent this, we save cleaning our floors as the last task for each of our zones. I won’t sweep or mop my bathroom until the tub, sink, toilet, mirror, and storage are properly cleaned and organized.
Set a Timer
Sometimes I get a little too in my head while cleaning and will focus on getting the dust out of one tiny nook that no one will actually ever see because guests (surprisingly) don’t actually examine every cranny in your home when they come over—this is a huge time waster.
Whenever we start cleaning a new zone in our apartment, we set a timer. Once it’s up, we’re done, and this is a rule we hold each other to every time we clean. Since we know that the timer noise is a hard cut-off for us, it forces us to prioritize cleaning the big-picture things and spend less time on the little things that annoy us personally but don’t really matter.
If there’s time left, we’ll eventually also clean those small nooks and crannies but the last thing we want is for the timer to end in our zones and all we have to show for the 30 minutes of cleaning is a small spotless area in an otherwise still-messy room.
