Fast Whole House Cleaning Routine for Messy House

Tired of a messy house? You need a quick house reset. I have for you a quick house cleaning routine with a fast whole house cleaning checklist that will help you clean your home in a day. This is not a deep cleaning, but a fast cleaning routine for homemakers and busy moms to get home in order and have a clean home in a day without spending hours on home cleaning.

Preparation For Quick House Cleaning

A whole-house cleaning in a day is not an easy task. I like to prepare myself for this, and here are the things that you can do too. To make the speed cleaning and house reset easy and efficient.

Pick the Right Day

I highly recommend picking a day with a set intention to get this done. Planning a day for this makes it more manageable and helps you plan the day better; weekends are ideal.

Fuel Yourself First

You have a lot to do today, and you both need a lot of energy to deal with it, so start with a nutritious breakfast to keep yourself fueled and energized.

Make a Cleaning Playlist

Resetting your household is a lot of work and not quite fun, but putting on some music will make it enjoyable for you, or you can make good use of your time by listening to a podcast to make the mundane task productive and get work done.

Build the Right Mindset

Don’t forget your mission; you just want to get back on track. You are not here for deep cleaning and making things perfect, or beautifying your home. You are just bringing it back to functional or maintaining it.

I need to remind this to myself of this very often, as I tend to get into deep cleaning and spend too much time in one area, and have incomplete tasks at the end of the day.

Time-Saving Tips for Fast Home Cleaning

Follow the 20/10 Rule

This is very effective to get the most done. Also, this helps to beat the issue discussed above of spending too much time on one area.

Set a timer of 20 minutes for each room or task, and make sure to complete the task in the set time. Once done, take a 10 min break. Make sure to break big tasks into small tasks that are doable in 20 min.

Take a Break from Cooking

You will be spending a lot of time and energy resetting your house to normal. Cooking at home will add to your work and also cause delays.  Hence, it will be best either to eat out or get a takeaway.

I sometimes make some extra food the day before, so that I don’t have to worry about meals.

Load Laundry Simultaneously

Before starting the cleaning work, you can put some laundry for washing and unload and load while cleaning.

Before diving into details, you may like to use this cleaning planner to make a routine house cleaning schedule well and easy to manage.

Whole House Cleaning Checklist: Step-by-Step

So let’s begin to tackle each room of the house and get things in order.

Do a Quick Mind Dump

You will have hundreds of thoughts running through your mind and all the things that have piled up, right from the grocery, to laundry piles, and mess in the living room. 

Let’s accept it, we cannot get it all done together, so we need to have an action plan.

The best way to handle this is by dumping all your thoughts. I dump all my cleaning chores in this cleaning planner Google Sheet, room by room, if I am planning to do a house reset in a day. If I am planning to do it in parts over a week, I do it in the weekly planner by just brain-dumping tasks and selecting a day, and it gives me a weekly plan.

Just set a timer for 3 minutes and write down all the thoughts that come to your mind, don’t worry about the word, spelling, or whether it’s right or wrong, just pour your thoughts out of your brain. 

Once done, trust me, you will feel so light and relaxed. If you have more to write, keep going on with it. The timer is just to get you started.

I often keep adding to it later, too, as I keep remembering. This is just to know what all we have at our hand to deal with.

Once this is done, just mark the things that are important and urgent; these will be the priority to attend. Once your priorities, you can start with getting the household back to normal, starting with different key areas of the house.

Quick Bedroom Reset

• I like to start the house reset from the bedroom, so that the resting place is taken care of and it’s less work. Start by making your bed. 
• Bedrooms are generally not messed up much, as we tend to spend less time there, and getting it done is easy.
• Getting done with at least one area of the house will boost your spirit to get more done.
• But most importantly, I recommend tidying up the bedroom first so that when you are all tired of the work, you have a comfortable place ready to fall on and rest.

Fast Living Room Reset

This area of the house is easy to get messed up and takes most of the time. Just focus on making the place functional.

• Start by keeping things back in their right place.
• Put all the toys and random stuff around in a bin or basket. This will quickly make the place clean. You can later spend a little time each day to organize and keep the items in the basket in their right place.
• Fluff and arrange the cushions.
• A quick vacuum or sweep will get all the dust off.
• Give a quick wipe to the surfaces.

Quick Kitchen Clean-Up

The kitchen is the key to the household, and there are many things to take care of in this area of the house.

• Start by clearing up the counter, and keep loading the dishwasher as you keep finding dirty utensils.
• Keep the appliances and other kitchen tools back in their designated places.
• Go through the fridge and remove any expired or waste food. Many times when we are busy and don’t spend much time cooking, the vegetables tend to rot and contaminate the fridge.
• Give a quick wipe to the hob and chimney.
• Give a good wipe to the counter and cabinets.
• Keep the grocery bags in the pantry and perishable food in the fridge. You can later do the work of filling the pantry.
• Give a quick sweep.
• Run the dishwasher.
• Take out the trash.

5. End with Bathrooms

The last area of the house to be attended to should be the bathroom.

• Remove all the waste items, empty waste bottles, and tubes.
• Keep all the things in the right place.
• Clean the basin and mirror.
• Next, clean the bathtub, toilets, and the floor.
• Refill the essentials like soap, buds, and cotton balls.
• Place clean and fresh towels and mats.

Once I am done with bathroom cleaning, I immediately take a bath; that’s the reason I always attend to the bathroom last.

Reset Your Home for the Week Ahead

Now that you are done with all the major things and the house is back to being functional, take a few minutes to relax, sip tea in the fresh air, and appreciate yourself for the work done.

We still have 2 major things to be done to reset the household back on track and fully-functional

Meal planning

Meals are the most important part of our life and running the household. It requires a lot of effort to put up meals for a family every day. To have things running smoothly, it is essential that you plan meals for an entire week. This takes a lot of pressure off your head on a day-to-day basis when you get busy with work and life.

I use my meal planner with an integrated grocery list that auto-populates and categorizes all the items in the grocery planner based on the meals.

• You just list all you favroite meals for the day so you can autopopulate them and select from drop down to make meal planning very easily.
• I have a collection of easy meals for busy women. You can check it here. It includes a wide range of options from crockpot dinner to work meals.
• Once your meal options are ready, just assign a day to each based on your schedule for the week. I get pretty exhausted by Thursday, so I  reserve the easiest recipes for the end of the week.

Grocery Planning

If you are using my meal planner, the grocery list will be very easy for you. You just need to give a check to it and add any other house essentials apart from food items.

Otherwise, you can prepare a grocery list and order them while resting and get them delivered, or plan a grocery shopping plan the next day.

If ordering groceries is not the option for you, get to the grocery store for the shopping and have dinner at the restaurant on the way back. You really deserve it.

Avoid Messy House with Daily Cleaning Routine

With meal planning and grocery done, your next week is gonna run smoothly and peacefully. Additionally, to make home cleaning easy and simplified, you can make a daily cleaning routine that will help you avoid getting overwhelmed and having a messy home. A cleaning planner really helps you focus on checking with house cleaning needs. You can read my post on Realistic daily and weekly cleaning schedule to build your cleaning schedule.

With this approach of getting your messy home back to normal, you will be able to get a clean home without overwhelming yourself, and focus on making a cleaning routine to maintain it. Once you are comfortable with this, you can move to deepcleaning and other house maintenance as a homemaker. Little steps will take you a long way.

Related posts you may like:

Realistic cleaning schedule for working mom

10 Simple working mom cleaning hacks for a tidy house