How To Deep Clean: A Room by Room Deep Cleaning Guide

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Sometimes you need to quickly clean the house because your mother-in-law called to say she’d be over in 20 minutes and, oh, crap, the place is a disaster.

Other times, you need to do a deep clean. It might be “spring cleaning” or it might be before the holidays when you know you’re going to have guests and you really want the place to sparkle.

Whatever the reason, there are lots of things that need a deep clean that you’ve probably forgotten about. They aren’t things you notice every day, but when you read this list of things to deep clean and then go look at them in your house, you’ll see what I mean.

When to Deep Clean

The best time to deep clean things in your house is when you have time to actually deep clean the things in your house.

Don’t try to wash the window tracks in those twenty minutes before Nana arrives. She won’t be impressed with the sparkly window tracks when everything else is a mess.

Do your deep cleaning periodically through out the year. You can pick a few weekends a year, or you can keep a list of the deep cleaning items you need to tackle and do one per week.

I prefer that second method of one deep cleaning task per week because it never feels overwhelming.

Where Do I Start? Everything Seems To Need a Deep Clean

I have a “room of the week”. I start in the kitchen. I pick a task, like, “clean the windows” or “deep clean the fridge”. Then I move, basically clockwise through the house, room by room, week by week.

I combine rooms like the dining room and living room because they don’t really get a lot of regular traffic, so I can tackle them quickly.

Where to start with your Deep Clean - The Kitchen

So my Deep Clean rotation looks like this:

Week 1: Kitchen

Week 2: Dining Room/Living Room

Week 3: Family Room/Office

Week 4: Bathrooms

Week 5: Master Bedroom

Week 6: Kids Bedrooms

That means that every 6 weeks, some type of deep cleaning activity is happening in each room of the house. That does NOT mean that I’m not tidying daily and doing light weekly cleaning in each of those rooms.

If you aren’t keeping on top of cleaning, don’t start deep cleaning until you have developed that habit.

You’ll end up with a bigger mess than you started with because you will have had to tidy up and move junk around just so that you can GET to the things that need to be deep cleaned.

That makes this a bigger job than you want it to be. The key is to make these tasks NOT overwhelming.

So build daily and weekly cleaning habits first if you haven’t already.

Ok, So What Do I Deep Clean?

Let’s take it room by room, following the schedule I set for myself.

Things to Deep Clean in The Kitchen

  • The outside of the cabinets
  • The inside of the appliances
  • The window(s)
  • The baseboards
  • The floor (especially if you have a tile floor with grout)
  • Light fixtures (don’t forget to dust the bulbs)

Things to Deep Clean in the Dining Room & Living Room

  • The soft furniture (vacuum and spot clean)
  • The windows and shiny surfaces (tackle mirrors and other shiny surfaces at the same time since you’ve got the window cleaner out)
  • The baseboards
  • The curtains & other soft items (blankets, pillows, table runner, etc)
  • The floor
  • Light fixtures

Things to Deep Clean in the Family Room/Office

  • The windows and shiny surfaces (mirrors, tv screen, etc)
  • The soft furniture (vacuum and spot clean)
  • The kids toys (if you don’t have kids, the other “stuff” that accumulates in the family room)
  • The baseboards
  • The curtains & other soft items
  • The floor
  • Light fixtures

Things to Deep Clean in the Bathrooms

(Remember, this isn’t your weekly cleaning, toilet cleaning isn’t on this list, because you should be cleaning it often).

  • The shower/tub
  • The shower curtain or glass door
  • The window
  • The baseboard
  • The cabinet of the sink
  • The floor
  • Light fixtures

Things to Deep Clean in the Master Bedroom

  • The mattress
  • The soft furniture ( vacuum and spot clean if you’ve got a chair or a fabric headboard, etc)
  • The big bed linens & other soft items (not your sheets which you should be doing weekly, but the big comforter or duvet, the throw blanket, the curtains, etc.)
  • The windows
  • The baseboards
  • The floor
  • Light fixtures

Things to Deep Clean in The Kids Bedrooms

  • The “crevices” (my kids stash stuff behind the bed, under the bureau, etc. I don’t know why this only happens in their bedrooms, but it’s definitely stuff I don’t see, so I make a point of cleaning those spots every few weeks)
  • The big linens (comforter, curtain, etc)
  • The windows
  • The baseboards
  • The floor
  • Light fixtures

If you can circle through all of those things on a somewhat regular basis, you’ll keep your home CLEAN, not just clean?.

Ok, Great, But How Do I Deep Clean All of That??

I thought you would ask! I’ve pulled together the best deep cleaning tips and hacks for you in this Deep Cleaning post so that you can get through these jobs easily.

What About the Elephant in the Room?

Figuratively, the elephant in the room that I haven’t even mentioned here in this post on deep cleaning is decluttering.

Literally, you may have an elephant in a room that needs to be decluttered.

Deep cleaning vs Decluttering

No matter what type of person you are. Type A, Type B, minimalist, hoarder…

You still need to declutter on a regular basis. I don’t count decluttering as cleaning. To me that is organizing, so I haven’t included it on my lists as something that needs to be done as part of a deep cleaning routine.

But it absolutely needs to be done. No one will notice your sparkly windows and shimmering baseboards if the house is filled up with clutter.

Not to worry, I can get you started on that, too! This post gives you 37 Things You Can Throw Away Now to get you in the mood for getting rid of junk.

Work It Into The Routine

Now, if you’ve got an established cleaning habit that is keeping you just above water on the clean house scale, then see what you can do to work some of these deep cleaning tasks into your routine.

Will it work to do one a week with each week having it’s own designated “room”? Or maybe you can do two a week?

See what works best for your life and then see how much more sparkly the house feels when you start deep cleaning these neglected areas.

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