Clean Your House the Way an Office Gets Cleaned

Sydney, it is the middle of September, the wattle is finishing, the windows are open for the first time since April and the whole city is in the mood to clean something. So before you go and buy a new mop, a question. Why is the office you work in cleaner than the house you live in? Not tidier, cleaner. The office gets done by people with a method and a written plan, and the house gets done by whoever is home on Saturday, with 1 cloth, 1 spray and a feeling of having done enough. I had exactly that cloth, the one that did the bathroom and then, an hour later, the kitchen bench, and it took a look at how a commercial crew works to see what was wrong with it.

None of what follows costs more than a packet of clothes. It is 4 habits the cleaning trade has had for decades and the home never picked up.

One Colour of Cloth Per Zone

Walk behind an office cleaner and you will see they carry 4 colours of microfibre, and the colours are not decoration. Red is toilets and urinals only. Yellow is the rest of the bathroom, basins and mirrors. Green is the kitchen. Blue is everything else, desks, doors, glass. The red cloth never leaves the toilet cubicle, the green one never sees a bathroom, and that is the whole system. It exists because a cloth carries whatever it last wiped to whatever it wipes next, and a crew doing 30 bathrooms a night cannot afford to guess which cloth did what.

At home, 4 cloths in 4 colours, kept in 4 places, is the single biggest hygiene change you can make for under $20. The red one lives under the bathroom sink and does the toilet and nothing else. The green one lives in the kitchen drawer. And the family rule is the colour, not the cloth, so when a cloth wears out the replacement is the same colour and nobody has to remember.

The Cloth That Did the Toilet Is Wiping the Bench

This is the thing I found in my own kitchen. The cloth on the tap was the one I had used on the bathroom basin that morning, and the basin cloth had been used on the toilet seat the day before, because there was 1 cloth and it went where it was needed. A commercial crew would be sacked for that on the first night. At home it is normal, and it is the reason a kitchen can be wiped every day and still be the least clean surface in the house.

The Chemical Matches the Surface, Not the Room

The second thing a crew does that a home does not is read the surface before reaching for the bottle. An office cleaning scope lists every material on the floor, ceramic tile, vinyl, carpet tile, timber, polished concrete, natural stone, and each has its own product, because the wrong one does damage that does not show for a year and cannot be undone. A home has the same surfaces and usually 1 spray for all of them.

The Sydney Stone Benchtop

Half the kitchens in this city were renovated with a stone bench in the last 10 years, and a good share of them are being cleaned with the same spray that does the bathroom, which is usually alkaline or has a citrus scent, which means it is acidic. Marble is etching under both. The sheen goes first, in dull patches around the sink and the kettle, and by the time it is obvious the surface has to be professionally repolished. Commercial crews are told in writing not to take anything but a neutral cleaner near stone, and the reason is that the last crew who did is still paying for the bench.

The 5 Minute High Touch Round

Offices separate the daily from the weekly, and the daily is not a clean, it is a round. A porter walks the floor once or twice a day and [https://kea-home.com/how-to-ensure-your-home-looks-pristine-and-stays-that-way/: the lift buttons, the door handles, the fridge handle, the tap levers, the kettle, the photocopier keypad. It takes minutes and it is the reason a busy office does not pass a cold around the way a family does.

At home the list is short and it is the same every day. Fridge handle, kitchen tap, bathroom tap, light switches in the kitchen and hall, the front door handle inside and out, the kettle handle, the TV remote. One blue cloth, one pass, 5 minutes after dinner. The weekly clean is for looks, the daily round is for health, and most homes do the first and never the second.

After a Winter of Colds

We have just come out of the flu months, and the round is why it matters. The things on that list are the things a sick child touches on the way to the bathroom and a well parent touches on the way to the kettle, and in an office a porter would be wiping them 3 times a day in July. Nobody is asking for that at home. Once, in the evening, in the months when the house has a cold in it, is the office habit sized down to a family.

The Scope on the Fridge

The last habit is the one that holds the other 3 together, and it is a piece of paper. Every commercial cleaning contract runs off a scope, a document that lists each zone of the building, what gets done in it, how often, with what, and when. The crew does not decide on the night what the kitchen needs, the scope already says, and a new cleaner on their first shift does the same job as the one who has been there 3 years.

I will say where I got the idea. While I was writing this I got hold of the scope a company doing local office cleaning for Sydney businesses works from for a hybrid office, the sheet with the floor split into zones and a frequency against every task, heavier midweek when the building is full, lighter on the Monday and Friday when it is not. It is a page long. It is more planning than most houses have ever had, and there is no reason a house cannot have the same page.

A 2 Bedroom Apartment’s Scope

Zone by zone, on 1 sheet stuck to the fridge. Kitchen: bench and tap daily with the green cloth, floor twice a week, oven and fridge interior monthly. Bathroom: toilet daily with red, basin and mirror twice a week with yellow, shower screen weekly with the squeegee, grout monthly. Bedrooms: floors weekly, sheets weekly, blinds monthly. Living: the high touch round daily with blue, floors twice a week, the couch monthly. Entry: the mat shaken out weekly, more when it is raining, which in a Sydney spring is most weeks. Whoever is home does what the sheet says for that day, and the argument about whether the bathroom was done stops, because the sheet has a box and the box is either ticked or it is not.

Bins, and the Bin Room You Do Not Have

Offices treat waste as an operation, with a bin room, a collection day and a contractor who will refuse a bin with the wrong things in it. A home has 3 bins by the fence and a vague idea of which is which, and the same rule applies, a red lid bin with food in the yellow lid recycling is a contaminated collection. Most Sydney councils now have or are rolling out the green lid bin for food scraps, and once your street has it, the kitchen needs a small caddy on the bench and the caddy goes out every second night, not when it is full, because a full caddy in a warm kitchen in October is how a house gets fruit flies.

And the one office habit that transfers directly is the visit after lunch. An office with a Friday team lunch has a porter through the kitchen at 2 to clear the food waste and wipe the benches before anything hardens. A family Sunday lunch is the same event, and 10 minutes at the end of it, plates scraped into the caddy, bench wiped with the green cloth, floor spot mopped under the table, is less work than the same job on Monday morning after it has set.

That is the 4. The cloths are the cheapest and the scope is the one that lasts, and by the time the jacarandas are out in November the house will have been cleaned by method for 2 months, which is longer than most Saturday cleaning ever holds.