How To Clean Your Home Fast: 5 Amazing Hacks You Need To Try!

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Sponsored content: This post has very kindly been sponsored by Very. All words, thoughts and opinions are by Melanie Lissack.

Cleaning and organising your home at the start of a new year can feel overwhelming. Once the Christmas decorations are down, many of us want to instantly reset our spaces and create a calm environment ready for a fresh start. Yet, with natural light still limited due to the darker winter days, the best approach is to focus on realistic routines using a few smart cleaning and storage hacks to ensure a quicker, more manageable process.

To clean and organise your home fast in 2026, here are five of my tried and tested cleaning tips for a tidy and hygienic home in minutes:

1. Set a 3 song limit for each room and hide your phone!

Most of us find cleaning a chore, with one of the biggest hurdles being the associated boredom and the tendency to get distracted. To concentrate on the job in hand, firstly, I will leave my phone in another room to the one that I am cleaning in order for my attention to not get diverted by notifications or unimportant messages. I’ll then set myself a ‘three song limit’ for each room. I’ll pick three high-energy, upbeat songs to play with the aim to get as much cleaning and tidying done before my playlist comes to an end. I find that music energises you to move and clean quicker in time to the beat, helping you get more done in a shorter space of time than if you cleaned to no background noise, or to a conversational radio station or podcast. 

Do as much as you can in one room, then as soon as the three songs finish, move onto the next. Focus on the important tasks first before moving to the next space to keep up your motivation levels.

1. Sanitise your surfaces while also removing dirt by investing in an all-in-one steam cleaner

The benefits of steam cleaners are currently trending all over social media and for good reason: a good steam cleaner not only effectively lifts dirt and grime at the touch of a button, it also sanitises your home at the same time, ridding it of any nasty winter viruses. 

Simply polishing door knobs and other ‘high-touch’ areas will not eradicate surface bacteria, so it’s a good idea to invest in a high-quality, multi-tool steam cleaner that is suitable to clean your floors, as well as convert into a handheld device to deep clean taps, sinks, showers, tiles, windows, flat surfaces and appliances.

The continuous steam of a good-quality steam cleaner lifts everyday stains quickly and easily without having to put in a lot of elbow work. I use the Vax Steam Fresh Total Home Steam Cleaner which kills 99.9% of bacteria and can be used throughout my home, giving my surfaces a deep clean in a short space of time and without a lot of effort.

3. Make it smell clean, quickly 

Had a friend or family member call and announce they are in the area and will be over shortly? Home not up to scratch? These five minute fragrance hacks are the quickest things that you can do to give the impression of a clean home.

First, open all the windows and leave your property to air for ten minutes to reset your home’s natural fragrance. Your home needs to breathe, and all windows in your house should be opened weekly (regardless of the weather) to allow fresh air to circulate. This not only rids your home of lingering smells from cooking or pets, it also helps stop the build up of mould and mildew. 

To aid your home smelling clean and fresh, try the cotton wool trick; simply spritz or dab a scented cleaning agent onto a ball of cotton wool and pop one into your waste bins and/or on a small saucer on a shelf. This will make your home smell freshly cleaned for longer after a deep clean, and can also be used to gently lift the scent of your home for a short period. 

4. Storage that saves you time

Cleaning and tidying will take forever if you are just moving items from one place to the next. For an effortless organised home, storage is key. 

Even if you don’t have much built-in storage, look at where storage can be created via freestanding pieces. Invest in underbed boxes for storing towels and extra bedding, and make sure that any furniture like stools and coffee tables come with hidden storage inside. 

For open shelving, buy attractive wicker baskets that can be displayed while still accommodating a number of small items. 

If you have children, making sure that their bedroom or playroom has ample storage is a must. Invest in an attractive kids storage unit that will make it quick and easy to gather up toys and books and allocate them to one single unit. 

5. Use a microfibre cloth on delicate surfaces

Using a microfibre cloth to clean delicate surfaces will capture twice the dirt as other materials, as the tiny fibers are more effective at trapping dust (rather than just flicking it back into the air). On fragile items such as photo frames or televisions, use a large microfibre cloth in a clockwise motion to gather everything off the surface with the least movement.