7 Tools You'll Need When Deep Cleaning Your House

Cleaning is relative; deep cleaning is not. However fastidious your mother-in-law appears to be, neither she nor her cleaning crew is deep cleaning her house every day, or every week. Deep cleaning your home is not about taking a swipe at the baseboards or running an increasingly dirty rag over every visible surface. It's about stripping nearly everything down to the materials it was made from. The floor under your refrigerator and your stove becomes nothing but floor again — no oily residue, no dust, no random pieces of macaroni stuck to the fridge's feet. There's no dust on your ceiling fan blades, and you've even taken a stab at vacuuming the dust out of the motor vents. Your coffee maker will be made of coffee maker, not limescale and espresso crust.

You're not going to manage all this with a Swiffer and a microfiber rag. A deep clean requires specialized gear. But so many products, even highly rated ones, are meant to improve the way things smell or look superficially. Lists of deep cleaning products are often gimmick-ridden infomercial gadgets ... and those aren't bad for ideas and inspiration. For example, it's actually a pretty good idea to put nearly everything on a pole and to make a super-narrow version of everything so you can reach up to the heights and into the gaps. 

But that alone is not going to help you manage the grunt work you have ahead of you. What you'll want are quality gloves, brush attachments for your drill, scrapers, and more. Here are the tools you'll want to have on hand when you need to deep clean your house.

How it took so long to figure this out is a mystery, but sticking a brush — or a variety of brushes– on the end of a cordless drill instantly creates a heavy-duty cleaning tool par excellence. (That cordless bit is important; keep water away from your corded drills unless you plan to have your family complete the cleaning with your life insurance payout.) In fact, for some jobs what works best is a drill brush on the business end of an impact driver, which accepts the ¼-inch hex shaft natively and provides some extra oomph when scrubbing away at anything on a garage floor.

There are lots of knock-offs, but the original Drill Brush power scrubber by Useful Products brand offers a huge variety and are very durable, and should already be among your bathroom-cleaning supplies. The nine-piece drill brush set includes flat, cone, edge, corner, and bottle-brush-shaped brushes in a few sizes. They are color-coded by the stiffness of their bristles, with the softest intended for easy-to-damage surfaces and the hardest for grills, ovens, brick, and anything your five-year-old touches. Other sets are available to suit various scrubbing needs, and the company also makes scrubbing pads and a cleaning paste that aren't part of the standard brush set.

While we're on the topic of power brushes, an old electric toothbrush (or a dedicated cleaning device that is essentially an electric toothbrush) is an indispensable tool for many pro cleaners. They're great for grout lines when you don't need to break out the drill brush, or when the tile surface might get damaged by a brush that's too aggressive.

Yes, your vacuum cleaner is great. No one is questioning how much your Laser Vac-Nado with Vortex Pet Hair Disintegration works to suck up dirt and dust. But, again, deep cleaning is different from everyday household tidying. And while you can certainly get by with a decent vacuum and a long attachment hose, there are a few better approaches. One is a wet/dry shop vac, which would be a nightmare for daily maintenance cleaning but is a godsend for deep cleaning. 

One fan favorite is the Ridgid NXT 12-gallon shop vac, a 5-horsepower workhorse with a huge capacity, locking extensions, a HEPA filtration option, a built-in drain, optional dust-collection bags, and lots more. Dust bags make cleanup easier when you're dealing with a major mess, and when you deep clean, be sure to clean your wet/dry vac from time to time. Even more portable in spite of being caster-less, models like DeWalt's 20V Max wet/dry vac can operate on batteries or mains power, and stow easily, though they don't have quite as much suction as standard shop vac models.

Canister vacuums are also good options for deep cleaning because of their portability and emphasis on hoses and attachments. Miele seems to dominate this space, because they're great vacuums and possibly also because people like to go online and pretend they own a $700 Miele C3. If that's just too rich for your blood, Eureka's bagless Whirlwind NEN110D option is a very good canister vacuum at a much lower price point.

You know what a $700 vacuum won't suck up off the floor? Whoever paid the bill, of course, but also the sorts of stuck-on grime that looks like a miniature mountain range someone 3D printed in filth under your stove. For this kind of heavy lifting, you'll need something even more powerful than a Miele, and we like this budget-friendly Handy Housewares-inch nylon pan scraper or, even better, the KOHLER K-8624-0 kitchen pot and pan dish scraper with both nylon and silicone edges.

These scrapers might have evolved from metal bench knives and plastic dough scrapers, and in a moment of perfect symmetry are now being used for food prep. So, some are being made from food-grade materials ... always a plus for mysterious objects that are stored in the kitchen. And you certainly can't beat the price. You can buy 125 of these for the price of certain vacuum cleaners.

One problem with consumer-level cleaning tools is that they're underpowered in the manner of lawyer-approved things everywhere. So the cleaning power of steam doesn't always get its due in terms of its ability to lift dirt, to say nothing of lifting your hardwood straight off the subfloor. However, a steam mop can be a deep cleaner's best friend.

Due to its potential for floor destruction, products like the Bissell Power Fresh steam mop are being designed to work on sealed hardwood and other formerly risky surfaces. You should still avoid using a steam mop to clean laminate floors. The Bissell also features a slip-down scrubber for stubborn grime, and optional spring breeze fragrance discs, which you may want to keep hypothetical. During a deep clean, you're going to have enough competing scents as it is. This mop has 4.5 stars on a completely bananas 47,520 Amazon ratings.

Of course, the brand most readily associated with steam mops is Shark, and they continue to stay at the front of the pack. The Shark S7000AMZ steam mop includes rotating scrubbing discs, if a flip-down scrubber seems like too much effort. But the current hype seems to be about the PurSteam 10-in-one steam mop, which is designed to be hardwood-safe and also has a built-in handheld steamer.

Okay, look. This could go wrong easily if you're not careful, but if you take your time and think through what you're doing, it can go very, very right. The Ryobi cordless fogger and mister is an great idea, especially if you've already got a ONE+ 18V charger and a 2Ah lithium battery on. It can call forth a mist that reaches 15 feet, and by Ryobi's reckoning, can cover 1,000 feet per minute. (Cover with how much mist, though? Who knows? Strapped to the right car, you could probably cover 16,000 feet.) It has a ½-gallon tank and is louder than a space shuttle, but it does a spectacular job of distributing a fine chemical fog.

But why would you want to? In addition to the usual faintly murderous outdoor uses for a fogger, it can be gainfully employed indoors to disinfect and sanitize, just as foggers are used in hospitals to get much more effective results than traditional cleaning methods. The mist will reach places cleaning usually can't. It can also to combat a mold problem by distributing a treatment like Concrobium as mist. You must, of course, be careful not to breathe aerosolized chemicals (use all the safety equipment you can think of, like everything included in this RBLCXG protection kit) and keep the fogger moving so that only the finest mist will settle on any surface or equipment that can't cope with full-on wetness.

Remember that mother-in-law from the beginning of this article who was cleaning everything with an increasingly dirty rag? There's a reasonable chance she's also uses sweat-filled, hole-ridden dishwashing gloves as well. When you're deep cleaning, you'll burn through some consumables, even if it's mostly vinegar and baking soda. But there will also be consumables that are things you don't normally like to think of as single-use. Gloves should be thrown away and replaced regularly ... especially when you're removing large quantities of unpleasant substances in out-of-the-way places with metal angles and screw points that like nothing better than to puncture gloves.

Those same things also like to puncture fingers, so you obviously need the gloves. The best (though perhaps not the most environmentally friendly) solution is to use disposable nitrile gloves — such as these 9-mil powder-free black gloves, which have the added benefit of making you look like an auto mechanic or possibly an assassin. Like standard examination gloves, they're not textured, so if that's important to you can try these diamond-textured 8-mil TitanFlex Thor Grip industrial gloves. 

Now, to deal with that dirty rag. When you're doing the really gross jobs, you probably don't want to use your kitchen rag that you also use to wipe your hands and cover rising bread. Throw away anything that spends much time in contact with the space behind your toilet or under your dishwasher, so we recommend heavy-duty but disposable paper towels. Our favorite approaches are Tool Box professional white rags, available in many hardware stores. These come in a box and are dispensed from a roll through an opening like a cleaning wipe.

Tool Box blue shop towels, available in a roll of 200, are more absorbent and a little less durable than the white rags. Get both. Warning, you might get so addicted to these industrial-strength paper towels that you are tempted to use them every day. We say you should go for it, but they'll also work exceptionally well for your occasional deep cleaning jobs.