The 75-point home cleaning checklist, explained

HomeMaster's cleaners work to a written 75-point housekeeping standard. It covers six areas of a home, starting with the bathrooms, and each checkpoint describes a result you can see, such as "shower drain cover free of hair after rinsing". Working through all of it properly takes about 140 minutes, so on a shorter visit your priorities decide what comes first.

This guide walks through what the standard checks, why it is written the way it is, and how it translates into a 2, 3 or 4-hour booking. Even if you never book with us, the same logic works as a checklist for judging any clean.

Why write a cleaning standard down

Ask ten people what "clean" means and you get ten answers. One person means the floors are mopped. Another means the tap bases have no limescale and the mirror has no streaks when the light hits it. When nothing is written down, the result depends on who turns up and how they feel that day.

A written standard fixes that in three ways:

• It describes results, not effort. Each checkpoint says what the surface should look like when the job is done, for example "countertop free of oil, stains and watermarks, including under movable items". That is something you can check in ten seconds.
• It gives everyone the same words. A cover cleaner who has never been to your home knows what is expected. So do you, which makes feedback specific ("the shower glass still had soap scum") rather than vague ("it wasn't very clean").
• It stops the easy parts crowding out the hard ones. Under the bed, the underside of the toilet seat and the oil tray of the cooker hood are exactly the places a rushed clean skips. A checklist names them.

The six areas, in order

The standard lists the areas one to six and gives each a time allowance that adds up to the full 140 minutes. Each room area, from bathrooms to balcony, ends with a final presentation check: the room smells fresh, items are aligned, surfaces are clear and furniture is back where it belongs.

Bathrooms come first on the list. Starting there means the bathrooms are never the part that gets squeezed at the end of a visit. In most Singapore homes they hold the most detailed work, and humidity means soap scum and grime return quickly, so starting there protects the area people notice most.

Laundry and ironing is the last step, and it is done on request. If you do not want it, those 30 minutes go back to the rest of the home.

One cloth, one zone

The cloth system is the part of the standard most worth copying at home. The rule is short: one cloth, one zone. A cloth never crosses from one zone to another, which is how dirt and germs are kept from travelling around your home.

The cloths are part of the kit every HomeMaster cleaner brings: seven of them, each with a colour and a single job:

• Blue for bathroom surfaces, basins and the shower. It never leaves the bathroom.
• Purple for floors, skirting and corners only.
• Green, used dry, for dusting furniture, electronics and decor that skin does not touch.
• Pink, used damp, for furniture and surfaces people touch, such as the dining table.
• Kitchen wipes for grease, and a brown cloth for drying and polishing kitchen surfaces.
• Yellow, lint-free, for glass and mirrors, always used last.

You do not need to memorise the colours. What matters is the idea: the cloth that wiped around the toilet should never be the one that wipes the table where your children eat. Because the cloths arrive with your cleaner, the system comes with them. It is also worth copying for your own cleaning between visits: cloths in a few different colours make the rule easy to follow.

About 140 minutes: what fits in 2, 3 or 4 hours

The standard takes about 140 minutes to work through properly in one pass. Real homes vary: a second bathroom, a kitchen used for daily frying or a large basket of ironing all add time. Here is what that means for each session length.

A 2-hour visit is not a worse clean. It is a focused one, and it works well for a smaller home that is cleaned often, or when you only want the bathrooms and kitchen done properly. The mistake is booking 2 hours and expecting all six areas plus ironing. Our guide to how many cleaning hours a flat needs gives starting points by home type.

Using the checklist yourself

You can borrow the checkpoints to judge any clean, whether it was done by a cleaner, a family member or you. After a visit, spend two minutes on the places that give a rushed job away:

1. Look at the bathroom mirror and shower glass with the light on. Streaks and a cloudy film show up at once.
2. Check the base of the taps and the shower drain cover for limescale and hair.
3. Lift one item on the kitchen counter, such as the kettle or a jar, and look underneath.
4. Glance under the bed and behind the bedroom door.
5. Run a finger along a window sill or grille.

If those are clean, the rest almost always is. If they are not, you now have specific words to use when you give feedback. The full room-by-room version is on our home cleaning checklist page, and our guide to what a home cleaner does covers the jobs that sit outside any cleaning checklist.

How it works with HomeMaster

Every HomeMaster cleaner is trained against this standard before their first job, and is background checked and reference verified. Sessions are 2, 3 or 4 hours with one cleaner per visit, so the standard is worked through steadily by one person rather than split across a crew.

Before a visit, tell Helen, our AI assistant on WhatsApp, which areas matter most this time, for example "bathrooms and kitchen first, ironing if there is time". She passes your priorities to your cleaner. If a checkpoint was genuinely missed, tell Helen: a quality miss is compensated with a voucher. You can see what a session covers on our home cleaning page.