Ways to Keep Your Home Clean in Under 15 Minutes Daily

As a new Mom (I’m a year in to motherhood, so am I even still considered “new” at this point?), I’ve realized that you just simply can’t do it all. Taking care of your child (and yourself), working a full-time job, cooking for a family, and keeping your house spotless — it’s a lot. Through some trial-and-error, I’ve realized that there are a few small tasks I can do in just 15 minutes that actually make an impact on the state of my home. Things like a deep clean of the bathroom or a hardcore scrub inside my oven can be done less often. And everyone will survive — I promise. Here are three ways to keep your home clean in under 15 minutes a day.

Put Away Toys

This one is exclusive to parents, but could easily apply to any other type of clutter in the main areas of your home (maybe that’s clothes in your bedroom or papers in your office). It takes just a minute or two to collect all the toys strewn across our living room and put them in the storage baskets. While it’s not a perfect solution, the room looks neater and larger and I won’t end up stepping on a wooden puzzle piece. Not that that’s happened to me or anything…

Wipe Down the Counters

The two areas in our house (and likely yours) that get the dirtiest are the bathrooms and the kitchen. And naturally those are the areas that come into contact with germs, so I do a daily wipe. For our kitchen, I do a daily wipe with an all-purpose cleaner each night. We eat dinner, James takes Henry to play, and I do the dishes and wipe down the counters, kitchen table, and his high chair.

For the bathrooms, I clean the two we use daily (the third is in our basement and doesn’t get as much action) by wiping down the sink and vanity top with an all-purpose cleaner. I usually do this while I’m brushing my teeth at night before bed. The key here (you’ll see a pattern soon) is to do the work when you’re already in the room. It will become part of your routine this way.

Spot Vacuum

It’s rare that you’ll need to vacuum your entire house on a daily basis, so spot vacuuming is usually sufficient. We have two cats, a toddler, and a crazy shedding woman in our house (spoiler alert — it’s me), and I’ve found a daily quick spot vacuum keeps things hair-free.

The areas I spot vacuum daily include:

• bathroom floors – I typically only do this to the bathroom we use for showering. I can skip the guest bath and the main-level bath on a daily basis since they don’t accumulate as much hair.
• living room couches – I do a quick vacuum of the high-traffic areas on our couch, which for us means where our two cats like to sleep.

I use the Hoover Dustchaser for my spot vacuuming and have loved it so far. It’s super light (under 3 lbs) and easy to carry, which is huge for me — pun intended. We have a 3-story house and it’s just not feasible for little ol’ me to lug a heavy standing vacuum up and down flights of stairs. I can stash this in our linen closet and take it out for a quick vacuum as needed.

It comes with two attachments — a 2-in-1 Dusting & Crevice Tool (perfect for cleaning your car’s cupholders, for example), and an Upholstery Tool (which I use on our new couch to try to keep it looking as new as we can).

Thank you to Hoover for providing me with a Hoover Dustchaster. All opinions are my own.