PHOTOGRAPHY: BRENT DARBY, ANTONIO PETRONZIO, LIZ McAULAY
Stacks of paper, piles of laundry, dust bunnies in the corner… It can all add to the never-ending mental load. But here at the Good Housekeeping Institute, we believe there should be no drudgery in the home. It was our founding mission statement back in 1924 and it still holds true today. So, when it comes to clever cleaning gadgets and speedy decluttering tips, there’s nothing we haven’t tried. We mean it – we’ve rubbed baby oil into splashbacks and found 21 things you can clean with bicarbonate of soda.
We’ve been testing the latest cleaning tools and sharing our decluttering hacks for over 100 years (before ‘decluttering’ and ‘hacks’ were a thing). We review hundreds of mops, vacuums and cleaning solutions every year in our state-of-the art lab – we have dedicated laundry and floorcleaning rooms – and we’ve tried most of the decluttering methods out there, identifying the pros and cons of each. So, every single tip in this guide comes personally recommended by the team behind our trusted reviews. This is how to clean and clear like a pro.