What order should I spring clean a house in?

Spring cleaning fails on sequence rather than effort. Dust dislodged from a shelf lands on a floor you cleaned an hour ago, and the day becomes a series of repeats. The order below is simply the one that means gravity works for you.

Safety

Step by step

1. Declutter before cleaning anything.Cleaning around objects takes several times longer than cleaning a clear surface, and half the objects are going anyway. Do the whole house's decluttering first, as a separate task.
2. Gather everything you need first.A carried caddy with cloths, sprays, bin bags and a brush. Walking to the cupboard for a cloth is where an afternoon disappears, and it is where you get distracted.
3. Work room by room, finishing each.Not task by task through the house. A finished room is visible progress and stops the whole thing feeling endless. Close the door behind you.
4. Start with the least used rooms.Spare room, dining room, hallway. They are quicker, they build momentum, and they stay clean while you work on the rooms that need most.
5. Work top to bottom in every room.Ceiling and cornices, light fittings, tops of wardrobes and doors, then walls, then furniture and surfaces, then skirting, then the floor. Everything you dislodge falls onto something still to be cleaned.
6. Do dry work before wet.Dust, vacuum and brush before any spray or water. Wet cloths on a dusty surface make mud, and it takes several passes to clear rather than one.
7. Take things down and clean behind.This is what makes it a spring clean rather than a tidy. Move furniture, clean behind and under, wash curtains, clean windows inside and out, wipe the tops of doors.
8. Let products dwell.Spray the bathroom and kitchen surfaces, then do something else for ten minutes. Most cleaners need time to work and almost everyone wipes them off too early, then scrubs.
9. Clean the things that clean.Washing machine, dishwasher filter, vacuum filter and brush, extractor hood filter. All work considerably better afterwards, and all are usually skipped entirely.
10. Do the kitchen and bathroom last of the rooms.They take longest, produce the most mess, and involve the most water. Doing them after the dry rooms means nothing is carried back through clean space.
11. Do all the floors at the end.Vacuum every room, then mop hard floors, working out of each room towards the door and finishing at the exit. Doing floors first guarantees doing them twice.
12. Open the windows throughout.Ventilation clears the products, the dust and the closed-up smell of winter. It is half of what makes a house feel different afterwards.
13. Split it across a weekend or several evenings.A whole house in one day is why people do not start. Two rooms an evening across a week finishes the same job without the dread.

Tips

• Take a photo of each finished room. It is a surprisingly effective way of maintaining momentum through the dull middle of the job.
• Put on something long to listen to. The work is undemanding and the time passes very differently.
• Whatever is left undone, do the floors and the windows. Those two produce most of the visible difference.

Common mistakes

• Cleaning the floors first — Everything dislodged from higher up lands on them. Floors are the last thing in every room and the last thing in the house.
• Wiping surfaces before dusting them — A wet cloth on dust makes mud that takes several passes to clear. Dry work always comes before wet.

If it doesn't work

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