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Learn how speed cleaning can transform any room in just ten minutes!
We all have way too much on our plates these days – work, family, cooking, cleaning, paying bills, and we want to spend our time focusing on what matters most in our lives instead of spending hours upon hours cleaning our homes.
Enter the 10 minute speed cleaning checklist.
Table of Contents
What Happened When I Tried Speed Cleaning
Speed cleaning is great for the day to day needs of our homes, and if you do it right, speed cleaning can prevent the need to do lots of time-consuming cleaning projects later. When I first heard about speed cleaning, I was skeptical. Could ten minutes cleaning a messy room really make a difference? Surely not.
Then one day, I decided to give it a try in my living room, and honestly, I was shocked at how much I could get done in just 10 minutes. My living room looked so much better than it did before my speed cleaning session! That was the day I realized that a small amount of cleaning is always better than not cleaning at all.
See, I used to be one of those people that saved my cleaning chores for “when I had time to do it right.” I would look at the magazines and books piled up on my coffee table, the Amazon boxes stacked in the corner waiting for to be taken out to the recycling bin, the layer of dust on the bookshelves, and the kids’ shoes that had been kicked off and onto the floor as soon as they got home and say to myself, “I’m going to set aside a few hours this weekend to really get this place clean.”
Do you know what happened? Life, that’s what. Those hours on the weekend never came, and my house got messier and messier. Now, I know that small amounts of time spent cleaning on a daily, consistent basis make all the difference in the world!
How To Use This Checklist
This speed cleaning method works for any room in your house. Today, I’m going to be walking you through how I use it in my living room, but you can use it to get your bedroom, your home office, your kitchen, or your dining room under control and tidy in ten minutes. When my house is really a mess, sometimes I like to do a whole house speed cleaning session where I move from room to room following my ten minute speed cleaning routine in each room. An hour or so later, and my whole house is company ready.
In each speed cleaning session, focus on one task from the checklist at a time. Start on the left side of the room and move to the right.
Before we start our speed cleaning:
You will need a few supplies before we start:
- A timer. I like using an actual kitchen timer, but the timer on your phone, microwave, ect. will work fine.
- A trash bag
- A laundry basket
- A cleaning cloth
- Your favorite surface cleaner
Also, let’s have a little chat. One of my favorite cleaning gurus, The Flylady, likes to say, “You can’t clean clutter.” She’s right. Speed cleaning won’t work if you’ve got so much clutter in a room that you can’t walk through it without tripping on a storage bin. You must declutter first. Check out this post on how to get started decluttering.
Remember – with speed cleaning, we are going to do our best to move fast. So let’s get our skates on (not literally, but if you can clean in roller skates, I’m impressed!) and set our timers for ten minutes!
Speed Cleaning Minute 1: Pick up the trash
With each item on the checklist, we are going to move through our room from left to right. With your trash bag in your hand, move from left to right in the room and pick up any trash you see. Toss old magazines, newspapers, food wrappers, junk mail, broken toys, dried out markers and pens, and anything that is unwanted clutter not in good enough shape to be donated. Spend one minute picking up trash and then move on. At the end of the minute, put the trash bag by the front door to be taken out when you are done.
Speed Cleaning Minutes 2 and Three: Out of place Clutter
Grab your laundry basket and for the next two minutes, let’s focus on picking up clutter that doesn’t belong in this room. Walk from left to right in the room, and find anything that doesn’t go in this room. Put it in your laundry basket.
Later, you can take a few minutes to sort through this basket and put the things inside where they belong or put then basket in a high traffic area of your home and put away one item in the basket every time you walk past it. For now, fill the basket for two minutes and then place it out of the room.
Speed Cleaning Minute 4: Dirty Dishes
I have a little habit of carrying my coffee cup around the house, putting it down somewhere, and then forgetting where I left it. This guarantees two things: one, there’s a good chance I’m drinking cold coffee because I keep losing my mug, and two, there’s a good chance there is a coffee mug needing to be washed in any room of my house.
Maybe you have tea cups, kids’ snack plates, or a cereal bowl that need to be washed and put away. Moving from left to right, move through the room and gather up any dirty dishes. Take them to the kitchen sink to wash later.
Speed Cleaning Minutes 5 and 6: Clear the surfaces
We’re halfway there!
Now that we’ve cleared away everything that doesn’t belong in the room – the dishes, the trash, the clutter, let’s spend two minutes clearing the surfaces. This will go fast because everything left to put away belongs in this room.
I’m working in my living room, so flat surfaces mean the coffee table, the end tables, and the bookshelves. In your bedroom, flat surfaces could mean night stands or the top of your dresser. Pick up flat surface clutter and put the things away where they belong.
Speed Cleaning Minutes 7 and 8: Clear the floor
The next two minutes are for clearing the clutter from the floor. Pick up everything you can for two minutes. In my living room, I pick up the shoes someone kicked off and left in the middle of the floor, the kids’ blocks and legos that are scattered around, and a stack of books that belong on the shelves. Just like you did for the room’s surfaces, pick up and put away the floor clutter.
If there are still things on the floor after two minutes, leave them for the next speed cleaning session. Sometimes, the entire job can’t get done in one speed cleaning session, and that’s okay! We are going to work on this one step at a time. If you stay consistent with daily speed cleaning, your house will get cleaner and cleaner.
Speed Cleaning Minute 9: Clean surfaces clean
Grab your cleaner and cleaning cloth. Spray all of the surfaces in the room with cleaner and quickly wipe them down. This is a quick wipe and not a deep cleaning scrub. Just spend a few seconds wiping each surface and move to the next task.
I like to use a cleaner that smells nice, so I’m getting rid of dust and smudges and also making the whole room smell nice too. I love a bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day because it always smells so good, but a homemade mix of a little vinegar, a little dish soap, hot water, and a scented essential oil put into a spray bottle would be a good and economical alternative.
Doing a quick wipe of surfaces really helps keep dust at bay. Here are some awesome dust cleaning hacks.
Speed Cleaning Minute 10: Tidy pillows and room accessories
We’re almost there!
For our last minute, let’s fluff the pillows, straighten couch cushions, and fold throw blankets. If you’re working in your bedroom, make the bed, or if you’re working in your bathroom neatly fold all of the bath towels. This will give the room that extra bit of polish that will make it look really neat and tidy.
Conclusion
We did it! Good job! Our room looks so much cleaner, neater, and happier, and all it took was a ten minute speed cleaning!
How often you work through this speed cleaning checklist is up to you, but I find that if I work through this checklist in each room of my house every few days, my whole house stays neat and tidy.
If you try our speed cleaning routine, post a before and after shot in our Facebook group. We would love to see how speed cleaning has changed your space!
