Cleaning is essential in maintaining the sanctity of your home. A clean and tidy space allows you to think clearly, sleep better, and uplift your mood. We’re sure most homeowners reading this have a routine cleaning schedule for the week. But there do come times when a standard cleaning is not enough, especially when guests or your in-laws are visiting. Times like those call for deep cleaning that rids your home of every speck of dirt, dust, and grime that the naked eye can see.
In the post below, we’re going to teach you what deep cleaning is, how it differs from regular cleaning, and how you should go about it. So, stick around as we divulge the secrets we at Happy Home Helpers have learned throughout our years of tidying up people’s homes.
What does a Deep Cleaning of Your House mean?
Deep cleaning is an extremely thorough cleaning of your home that rids the space of all visible dirt, dust, bacteria and germs. Basically, deep cleaning entails cleaning the most used and touched surfaces of your home along with those areas that aren’t tended to in your regular cleaning cycle.
It also entails using disinfecting chemicals to destroy microorganisms like bacteria. However, to really get into the meat of what deep cleaning is, we’ll have to compare it to regular cleaning.
Difference Between Normal Cleaning and Deep Cleaning
To put it simply, think of your usual normal cleaning session as surface cleaning and deep cleaning as a more thorough form of cleaning of hard to reach spaces. For most people, normal cleaning is light dusting, cleaning all surfaces, vacuuming and mopping the entire house. It entails cleaning up the toilets with a toilet cleaner, the sinks, showers and/or bathtubs and taking out the trash.
Deep cleaning, as the name suggests, goes deeper than that and touches on every section and crevice of your home. For example, when you’re cleaning the house on a weekly basis, you’ll most likely not move any furniture or any of your shelves from their place. In deep cleaning though, you move everything from its place including furniture and decor to clean the space behind them.
This is just one example, as there’s plenty of other spaces you target in deep cleaning that you normally wouldn’t when carrying out your scheduled, weekly cleaning.
In addition to cleaning every surface and space, in deep cleaning you disinfect your entire home from germs and microorganisms as well. Plus, you also tend to the areas that have been collecting dust and grime for several months, the areas that you don’t touch on during your regular cleaning cycle.
Standard cleaning is all about keeping your home comfortable and welcoming, while deep cleaning is only necessary when you start noticing a couple of areas that show signs of neglect.
How Frequently Should You Deep Clean Your Home?
Since deep cleaning is such an intensive process that requires you to access areas that are hard to reach, you don’t need to do it every week. The only time you should do it is when you start noticing cobwebs or the existence of grime in certain places. In short, we suggest deep cleaning your house once a year, or twice if you have pets and children.
The reason being that it’s an incredibly time and effort consuming process that calls for you to rigorously clean and disinfect every small corner in your home. It might even take a whole day if you decide to do everything in one go, provided you don’t hire a professional deep house cleaning service to do the job for you.
Also, we made this estimate assuming that you clean your house regularly every week. If you don’t then it may take you more than a day, and you’ll probably have to deep clean your home more than once a year.
The existence of pets also affects how often you should have your house deep cleaned. Mainly because pets, through no fault of their own, produce plenty of odor, messes and oftentimes shed fur. Houses like that can get pretty difficult to live in after a few months.
So, if you have pets, the more deep cleans you have throughout a year, the more beneficial it will be for your home in terms of how it looks and smells.
The Ultimate Deep Cleaning Checklist for Your Home
Without a proper plan, deep cleaning your home can be an incredibly exhausting task. Luckily for you, you don’t need to wrack your brain coming up with a plan, you can just follow our well thought out deep cleaning checklist.
This checklist will cover every room in your house. With that said, let’s get straight into it. Make sure you follow this checklist in the order it is written in to save as much time as possible.
Bathroom Deep Cleaning Checklist
Always start with the bathrooms as they’re the hardest to clean, so tackle them when you’re full of energy. When cleaning on a weekly basis, cleaning your bathrooms means cleaning and dusting all surfaces, light fixtures and maybe the sink. Deep cleaning is a lot more thorough and includes:
- Cleaning any windows, including inside the window tracks.
- Cleaning all light fixtures
- Scrubbing grout from the inside of your shower and/or bathtub.
- Cleaning all wastebaskets.
- Removing stains from and cleaning the baseboards and door frame thoroughly.
- Disinfecting all surfaces including the handles of the door.
- Cleaning the toilet’s base.
- Cleaning the shower doors, curtains and any crevices where dirt is visible.
Also, make sure to sanitize all surfaces that you touch and interact with on a daily basis as germs in the toilet include staph bacteria, gastrointestinal viruses and even food-borne viruses like E.coli.
Kitchen Deep Cleaning Checklist
Cleaning the kitchen regularly is very important as this is the most highly trafficked area of the home as well as the place where you tend to socialize and prepare food. Typically stand cleaning of the kitchen involves cleaning the stove top, counters, sink and floors.
In deep cleaning though, you have to give every appliance in your kitchen extra attention and clean its interior thoroughly, as well as cleaning all windows, inside the window tracks and baseboards which can be a major pain. Plus, you have to clean the sink and garbage disposal as well.
Due to the amount of work that needs to be put in, this is one job that we’d suggest delegating to a house deep cleaning service. If you decide against that though, this is the checklist you should follow for cleaning your kitchen.
- Cleaning any windows, including inside the window tracks.
- Clean and disinfect the external facings of all appliances and cabinets
- Thoroughly cleaning of the interior of all appliances (fridge, dishwasher, microwave, oven, toaster). Don’t forget about the top of your fridge and cabinets
- Diligently cleaning your stove hood and filter.
- Cleaning dust and food particles from backsplashes and countertops.
- Disinfecting all frequently touched surfaces including trash cans, light fixtures, switches and knobs.
- Scrubbing all baseboards
Of course this is just a general checklist. Every kitchen in every home differs slightly.
Bedroom Deep Cleaning Checklist
Deep cleaning your bedrooms is comparatively easier than the bathrooms and kitchen. That’s because there’s not much difference when it comes to deep cleaning and regular cleaning in the bedroom.
One important task to note, this will be the time you will want to wash all of your bedding, carpets, blanket and curtains. You’ll do well to follow the checklist below.
- Wash the bed sheets, curtains, comforters/duvet covers, blankets and rugs yourself or put them aside to take them to the dry cleaner or laundromat later.
- Once all bedding is removed, vacuum your mattress thoroughly.
- Clean all of the windows and dust all window sills, treatments, ceiling fans.
- Vacuum and clean under side tables, drawers and beds while focusing on the baseboards and corners.
- Make sure to vacuum any upholstery you may have whether it’s your bed frame, benches, chairs etc.
Living Area Deep Cleaning Checklist
Last but not least, you have the living area, the space in your home that you spend the most time in apart from your bedroom.
Deep cleaning this space is quite easy as well. The only thing that might take some effort is moving all the furniture and cleaning the spaces behind it. Nevertheless, here’s the checklist you should follow.
- Clean all of the windows and dust all window sills, treatments, ceiling fans.
- Wash all curtains and drapes.
- Clean and dust the furniture.
- Move furniture to clean the spaces underneath it and behind it.
- Wipe down all tables, cabinets and bookshelves.
- Remove all decor from shelves and furniture so you can clean it.
- Vacuum or wash the carpets and mop and/or vacuum the floor.
- Disinfect all electronics and surfaces in the room.
Why You Should Hire a Professional House Cleaning Service
Deep cleaning is an arduous and time consuming task. Even if you can do it yourself, it will leave you physically and mentally exhausted. So, why do it yourself when a professional home deep cleaning service can do it for you in half the time.
If you are on a limited budget, don’t commission them to clean your entire house, instead hire them on an hourly basis to do the really difficult rooms like the bathrooms and kitchen.
These experienced home cleaners will walk in with specialized equipment and cleaners that most people store in their home. Plus, they’ll know exactly where the dirt and bacteria hide in your home and will clean every hard to reach spot efficiently and thoroughly. To add to that, they know how to clean securely and without damaging any important items or surfaces.
They know what disinfectants and cleaning supplies work against baseboards, window sills, stainless steel, stone countertops and any other areas that need cleaning. There are many advantages to hiring an experienced cleaning company, but of course the final decision is up to you.
Dreading Deep Cleaning on Your Own?
Deep cleaning is meant to remove any trace of dust, dirt, grime and bacteria from your home. More than that, deep cleaning acts as a sort of reset for your home, removing any odd smells that have been lingering, improving the air quality and ensuring that you feel more comfortable in your own space.
A cleaning job as important as that should only be entrusted to yourself or an experienced deep cleaning service like Happy Home Helpers.
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