You are all guilty of a handful of house cleaning mistakes. These mistakes may not seem very obvious, but they are mistakes nonetheless.

These are common mistakes and if you’re aware of them now, then you can make a quick adjustment to correct them.

1. Doing it all at once in one day

Most of you are guilty of this. You like to reserve one day of the week as your cleaning day.

Whether you do the cleaning by yourself or as a family, you tend to leave all your cleaning chores to this day – the living room, kitchen, toilets, the car, everything.

What is wrong with this method? You get tired as you work. As you move from one chore to another, the amount of energy and enthusiasm you have left for cleaning reduces.

The amount of effort you might have put into cleaning your child’s room may not be the same when you’ve moved on to cleaning your own room.

As you start to tire out it becomes obvious in your cleaning too. So try not to do all your cleaning in one day. Instead, clean in bite sizes.

For example allocate 10 minutes a day for the toilet, and half an hour for the living room and kitchen every alternative day. This way you conserve both energy and time.

You also have lots of flexibility in being able to schedule your activities around cleaning.

2. Scrubbing isn’t always the solution

Food stain? Scrub. Coffee spill? Scrub. Floor stain? Scrub. All clean? Scrub anyway!

Scrubbing seems to be the most obvious answer to any cleaning problem. Regardless of what the source of the stain is or what the material of the affected area is, you scrub anyway.

You put all your muscles into trying to scrub the stain only to realize that you have made it worse.

For many stains, leaving the right cleaning product on them to soak for a few minutes is the best way to remove them.

There are different solutions and different methods for different types of stains; sofa cleaning and leather cleaning will require different materials and different methods to clean them.

3. Cleaning windows on a hot and sunny day

This is one mistake that many of you know but choose to do it anyway, simply because you love the sight of looking out to a sunny day through the clean and clear window glass.

What is wrong with this? Well the heat from the sunlight causes the soap to dry up on the glass and scrubbing this dried up soap can be damaging to the glass in the long-run, and if you take a good second look you can see some soap residue after the water dries up.

4. Thinking that every cleaner is a disinfectant

This doesn’t mean you use dishwasher liquid as a hand sanitiser.

Areas such as the sinks in toilets and kitchens are prone to a lot of bacteria and giving them a good scrub with your cleaning product may leave them shining like new but not necessarily rid of all the germs.

So It is suggested that you use a separate sanitizer or disinfectant after your normal cleaning to properly disinfect these areas.

5. Using the wrong tool for the job

You often sacrifice time, effort and money on cleaning something only to be left unsatisfied with the end result. Many a time this happens due to the use of the wrong tool for the job.

The wrong tool being used will not only give unsatisfactory results but will also have damaging effects. For example, a vacuum cleaner doesn’t work too well on grass.

How often have you had to buy new pans because the ones you bought last month now look like they have been used since the last decade?

Have you ever wondered that maybe it’s because of the way they’re being cleaned and not because the product is of inferior quality?

Try using a sponge or wash-cloth to scrub these pans instead of a metal coil scrub. When cooking in them, use wooden utensils. Metals will affect the non-stick layer on these pans.