Start high and finish low. If you take one rule from this page, take that one.
Every deep clean knocks dust off the shelves and ceiling fans, and all of it lands on the floor. Clean the carpet first and you'll be vacuuming it again by dinner. So the floors go last, and the order before that is mostly about not doing anything twice.
Here's the sequence we'd follow in our own houses.
Before you touch anything
Pick the rooms that get used
A whole-house deep clean in one weekend is how people end up with a clean kitchen and a half-finished everything else. Choose the two or three rooms the family actually lives in, usually the living room and kitchen plus the main bathroom, and finish those properly. Bedrooms and the guest room can be next weekend.
Clear the floor
Pick up the toys and shoes, and the stack of mail that lives on the ottoman. Move light furniture out of the way where you can. It goes faster than it sounds, and it's the step people skip that makes everything after it harder.
Open the house up
If the weather cooperates, open some windows. Fall in the Midlands is ideal for this; the summer humidity is gone and the pollen hasn't started. Airflow helps everything dry, and it clears out the dust you're about to stir up.
Then work from the top down
High-touch surfaces and dusting
Door handles, light switches, remotes, faucet handles, the refrigerator door. Wipe them with a damp microfiber cloth and whatever disinfectant you trust, following the label for how long it needs to sit. Then dust from the top: ceiling fans, the tops of door frames, shelves, blinds. Let it fall.
In kitchens and bathrooms, get the grime that collects at the base of faucets and around the toilet. That's where most of the smell in a bathroom actually comes from.
Upholstery
Vacuum the sofa and chairs with the upholstery tool, especially in the seams and under the cushions, where crumbs and pet hair end up. Flip and rotate cushions if they're reversible. For spots, blot with water and stop there. Upholstery fabrics vary a lot, and the wrong cleaner can leave a ring or pull color. If the whole sofa looks dingy, with no particular spot to blame, that's a job for professional upholstery cleaning.
Hard floors
Sweep or vacuum before you mop, every time. On tile, the grout is usually what makes the floor look dirty, and a mop mostly moves dirt off the tile and into the grout lines. When we do tile floors, a machine buffer works the buildup up out of those lines. Your knees will thank you for not using a toothbrush.
Hardwood wants very little water. A damp, well-wrung microfiber mop and a pH-neutral cleaner are all it needs. Steam mops and soaking wet mops are hard on the finish. If it needs more than that, we clean finished and engineered wood with a low-moisture method made for it.
Rugs and carpet, last
Now the floor. Vacuum slowly, in two directions, with extra time on the entry and the paths through each room. Look for pet spots and stains and blot anything fresh.
This is the step where hiring help makes the biggest difference, because home machines tend to leave carpet wet and soapy, and a soapy carpet gets dirty again fast. Our carpet cleaning uses very little water and no soap, and it's dry in about an hour, which means your deep-clean weekend doesn't end with a room you can't use. Area rugs get cleaned right there in your house, so there's no pickup or week without a rug.
If you have kids or pets and want to go one step further, add our antibacterial sanitizer on the carpet after cleaning. It's an add-on, not a requirement, and most people only bother with it in the playroom or where the dog sleeps.
What we'd skip
Honestly, carpet powders and fragrance sprays. They don't remove anything, and the powder ends up in your vacuum's filter and the bottom of the pile. A clean carpet doesn't need to smell like anything.
That's the whole list. Do it in that order, and the last thing you'll do is put the furniture back on a floor that stays clean. If you'd rather hand the floor part off, the coupons page lists a current deal for every surface we clean.