10 Tips to Keep Your Home Clean Between Cleans

The principle: small actions, big results

The difference between a home that needs six hours of cleaning every weekend and one that needs an hour and a half isn't size — it's daily maintenance. Ten minutes a day plus thirty or forty minutes once a week adds up to roughly two hours of distributed work, against the six concentrated hours that come from cleaning "when I find the time". For the same square footage the work weighs less when it's spread out. The weekly clean stops being a production and becomes more of a finishing pass.

The front door, the first line of defence

Floor cleanliness is decided at the entrance, not in the living room. A good-sized microfibre doormat — at least 90 × 60 cm — catches up to 50% of the sand and dust tracked in by shoes, and for a CHF 30–60 outlay it halves how often you need to vacuum the high-traffic zones. It's not an aesthetic detail: it's the single factor with the best return.

The natural complement is the "shoes off at the door" system: a shoe rack or a dedicated space near the entrance where shoes come off before stepping into the rest of the house. It removes sand, pollen, and animal residue picked up on the street — and translates into roughly 30% less dirt on floors, plus protection for parquet against scuffing.

The daily 10–15 minute routine

Ten minutes a day produces a home you can feel. The right routine happens at the morning wake-up or on the evening return, and it's made of small gestures that prevent the accumulation that becomes heavy work later: bed made (which traps dust), dishes straight to the sink, damp towels hung to dry, paper post triaged immediately into bin or tray, clothes off the sofa. Each gesture is seconds; together they change the dirt profile of the home.

It's worth pairing this with a ten-minute air change every morning. Throw the windows open after waking (in winter five minutes is enough, but do it): a single sleeping person produces around 300 ml of water vapour overnight, which without fresh air becomes wall humidity, condensation on glass, and — at worst — mould. The BAG recommends this as a cornerstone of indoor air quality.

Kitchen and bathroom: clean it as soon as you've used it

The kitchen and bathroom are the rooms where "right after" is worth ten times "tomorrow". Worktops, sink and hob cleaned right after cooking are one minute of work; if you wait, the grease dries and becomes a ten-minute job with a dedicated product. The same goes for tomato, sauce or oil splashes: caught fresh they wipe off in thirty seconds, the next day they need five minutes with baking soda.

In the bathroom the principle is the same. After every shower, run the hand-shower over the enclosure walls to rinse off the soap, then a small squeegee on the glass: thirty seconds of work that wipes out emerging limescale, soap stains, and the "shower never quite clean" feeling. The difference between a shower enclosure that lasts one year and one that lasts five comes down to those thirty seconds.

Weekly dusting and targeted vacuuming

Once a week, fifteen to twenty minutes of strategic dusting is worth the time: a barely-damp microfibre cloth across the high shelves, the remotes, the keyboard and the smartphone (objects we touch dozens of times a day and never clean), the radiators (winter dust burning on hot metal noticeably worsens the air), the door frames, and the skirting boards in the high-traffic areas. It's the pass that separates a "tidy" home from a "cared-for" one.

You don't need to vacuum everywhere every time. Focus on the areas that genuinely need it: the entrance and the kitchen always, the bathrooms always, the area around the sofa if there are pets in the house. Less-walked bedrooms can wait five to seven days without the difference being visible. For homes with documented allergies the calendar changes — the procedure is in Cleaning a home for dust-mite allergy.

Laundry and accumulation: two golden rules

Laundry left damp in the washing machine for more than a few hours gets mould going, which transfers to the fabric and is the leading cause of the "stale" smell on freshly washed textiles. The rule is just one: take it out as soon as the cycle ends, and hang it. A washing machine left damp for 24 hours or more is the start of the problem covered in our washing-machine disinfection guide.

The other rule that pays back over the years is "one in, one out". When something enters the home — a purchase, a gift, an item picked up — think immediately about what leaves to make space. It's the most underrated cleaning discipline: it caps long-term accumulation, reduces visible clutter, and simplifies every future clean because fewer objects means fewer surfaces to lift, dust and put back.

The weekly 30–45 minute routine

Once a week, pick an hour — early Saturday morning works for many — and do the full sweep. Vacuum the whole home (about 15 minutes), mop the floor in the high-traffic zones (15 minutes), light bathroom with WC, shower, sink and mirrors (10 minutes), kitchen with worktop, hob and sink using the right product (5 minutes). About 45 minutes total, and the rest has already been taken care of by the daily routine.

For a real spring clean — the seasonal pass that touches the spots the routine never sees — there's our complete spring-cleaning guide.

When a professional service makes sense

The most common mistake

Thinking "I'll clean when I have time" usually means, in practice, "I never clean". Homes stay reasonably clean with a scheduled routine, even a short one, far more than they do with sporadic intensive sessions. The trick is that the routine becomes nearly unconscious after two or three weeks: it stops being "a chore to do" and becomes simply "how the house lives".