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There’s a difference between keeping a house clean and running a schedule, and most people who’ve crossed that line can’t say when. Ten questions, about a minute, and a number out of 100 — plus the specific places where you quietly let things go.
How often does something get properly deep cleaned?
Your daily routine.
The kitchen, last thing at night.
A free Saturday, nothing scheduled.
Baseboards, door frames, light switches, the tops of doors.
Behind and underneath the furniture.
When is a room actually finished?
What's under your sink?
Machines.
Other people's homes.
Answer every question to see your score.
0 still to go.
Where your score came from
Where you let it slide
What the three scores measure
Cleaning obsession splits into three things, and they’re less connected than you’d assume. Plenty of people clean constantly and never move the sofa.
The Schedule
Frequency and routine. The daily baseline matters more than the deep clean, because a house with a morning reset never gets far enough behind to need rescuing. The nightly kitchen question is the sharpest one here — it’s ten minutes that changes how the next morning feels, and it’s the single most commonly abandoned habit in the whole category.
Standards & Depth
What counts as done, and whether you clean the things nobody sees. Baseboards, door frames and light switches are where the difference between a tidy house and a clean one actually lives. Light switches and door handles in particular are the highest-touch surfaces in any home and among the least frequently wiped.
Products & Kit
What’s under the sink and what’s in the cupboard. Worth being honest: this is the dimension with the weakest relationship to an actually clean home. A good vacuum is the one purchase that reliably changes the result. Most of the rest is preference, scent, and satisfaction — all legitimate reasons to buy something, just not efficacy.
The things genuinely worth doing
If you only ever added a few jobs, these are the ones with real returns rather than aesthetic ones. Extractor fan filters over the stove, which get greasy enough to stop working and are rarely touched. The rubber seal around the washing machine door, where mildew starts. Fridge seals, for the same reason. Mattresses, vacuumed and rotated a couple of times a year. And under the beds, where dust accumulates in the room you breathe in for eight hours a night.
And the honest caveat
A high score here measures how much cleaning you do, not how clean your house is. Those correlate less than the industry would like. Dust, the kitchen and the bathroom account for the overwhelming majority of what makes a home feel clean — and someone doing those three things well, on a sensible cycle, ends up with a house indistinguishable from one that took four times the effort.
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