This is just a friendly disagreement between friends. Do you clean your place room by room or by item?

I do it according to mess and need. The kitchen sink takes precedence over the floor. Dirty laundry wins over unmade beds.

I know how to clean fast and well, but it’s my house and my mess, and I don’t care. I do what I want.

By item. As long as I’ve got the vacuum out, I’m going to vacuum everywhere. But I live in an apartment, so that doesn’t take so long.

I always dust first and then I vacuume. If I can help my dusting by vacuuming, I do, or if I can take a wet cloth to what I’m dusting so it doesn’t end up flying in the air, I do that. Washing the floors is always last. I do room by room. My kitchen/dining/living room is all one small room that I manage like I mention. My bathroom is done by me taking everything and then the floor last. My kitchen (nook… small galley space) is taken daily or every other day depending on my routine, but that sink has to be washed out or it stinks. The bathroom one… not so much and can be taking weekly with the bathroom cleaning. I think it really is a room to room battle for me. I have doors that separate the hall, bedrooms and bathroom from the Living-dining-kitchen area. Basically, I live in what many of you would think of as a small motel unit. I live in a 785 square foot place. And, believe it or not, it is worth over 100,000USD. It isn’t the smallest place I’ve lived, but it is the smallest place I’ve tried to live in with a child, and it’s isn’t going well.

The garbage has to be taken out every night or the entire place stinks. In fact, I’m having smell problems from the garbage drawer because I haven’t been able to organise it because of my knee injury. We get very little sunlight in the house because it is on the north-side of a hill facing a fjord. I try to placate myself by mumbling… we’re hobbits….. but it doesn’t work. Especially when I can get my laundry to dry. I bought a dehumidifier this past winter and it has been a life changer. Still doesn’t change the fact that I live burrowed in to the side of a hill in a tiny little matchbox. I’ve given up using my bedroom as a place to sleep and use it just as storage now, and sleep on the sofa.

Wait…it needs cleaning????

^Well, perhaps once a year.

Can you have a friendly disagreement that isn’t between friends?

Top to bottom.

Well, if I’m cleaning for company I literally start in one corner of the bathroom floor and slowly work my way out through the entire house. Every floor, every surface gets cleaned.
Day to day I just clean as I go.

I did the annual dusting of my bedroom furniture yesterday. I do it once each year whether it needs it or not.

I clean by room.

As needed, when needed. A little every day.

WHSFT

I clean some every day too but do a major once over every 2 weeks. I start with dusting/sweeping the whole house, then vacuuming, then mopping floors and cleaning the bathroom. I usually start in the living area, and work my way around from there. My kitchen is always pretty clean, dishes done, so that is just a quickie wipe down counters and sweep/vac, mop. Room to room not item to item for me.

I clean my flat when expecting visitors, which isn’t very often, then I do it room by room. I dust and clean first then hoover. Phase one is the lounge, hall, stairs and upper landing. Phase two the bedrooms. Phases three and four the bathroom and kitchen and phase five the windows.

Both. I clean by room for the most part, but I vacuum and dust multiple rooms at a time. I have 5 pets and I frequently have children in the house, so I clean pretty much non-stop, it’s an endless string of chores that sort of blur together throughout the week.

I clean every day, even though we don’t have visitors! (So I don’t know why I do that actually). I’d say room by room. Since my reasoning is, you dust a room, you then put things away, then you polish and finally you vacuum because of the residue from the other activities. Maybe I do it room by room because I feel like I am achieving something.

Room by room. I only do one room in a day. There might be some rooms that don’t get cleaned in a month or so, because they are mostly storage or guest room or the like

When I had a cleaning lady, it was the only time in my life when the whole house would be clean at once. Otherwise, like now, there’s not enough free time and energy to do the whole house all at the same time. I do it on an as needed basis. Laundry is constant. Floors are as needed. If I have free time and there’s a need, I’ll do the inside of the refrigerator. If I’m standing in the kitchen and see some clutter on the counters, I’ll try to throw away stuff or organize it. Dishes going into or out of the dishwasher is on an as needed basis. It’s constant but it’s not all at once.

I have cats so they tend to stir up hair and dust, and I have a 9 year old child so there’s craft stuff constantly out on the table, and school papers constantly coming into the house.

So my answer is neither room by room nor by item – it’s just “as needed.”