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For sale: a three-bedroom flat in South London. Features include a one-year-old’s Weetabix wall art, a five-year-old’s splodges on the carpet, created with Mummy’s eyeshadow, and an oven that hasn’t been cleaned since 2019, thanks to two weary working parents.
I realise my new-to-the-market home doesn’t come with the most compelling pitch. While it’s not dirty, it’s certainly not show-home spotless. With two young children and a full-time job, I have an hour or so ‘free time’ each evening in between the kids falling asleep and flopping into bed myself, during which my husband and I whizz around like mad people doing laundry, filling lunchboxes and conducting a surface-level wipe. It’s enough to make our home look presentable, but ignores the deep-clean jobs such as tackling the fridge and the shower grouting.
I am too time (and energy) poor to do much more, but could a spring-cleaning session with Anna Louisa, a ‘cleanfluencer’ with over 4.2 million Instagram followers, change all that? Anna’s USP is speed – her tips are designed to be fast and effective, hence the title of her recently published book: The 5 Minute Clean Routine.
SOAP STAR: Anna Louisa’s cleaning hacks have gone viral on Instagram
When the day of Anna’s visit arrives, I feel nervous. Will she think I’m a slovenly mother, raising my children in a pigsty? I scoot around with the vacuum cleaner before she’s due, keen not to measure up poorly against her high standards. All my fears disappear, however, when I answer the door and Anna, 35, immediately tells me my flat looks beautiful. It’s clear she understands the pressure to present a picture-perfect home when having people over, as well as my predicament in trying to fit cleaning around work and kids.
Anna was a primary-school teacher when she started growing her social-media following, initially posting interiors content. But when she had her son Oliver, now three, ‘it was harder to run around Dunelm doing shopping posts’, says Anna, who pivoted towards cleaning content she could film at home. She started sharing hacks (such as quick ways to change the duvet cover and clean the shower screen), and saw a huge response from her followers.
When she reached 200,000 followers, Anna posted a video that perfectly typifies her content – the 12-second clip sees her sprinkling a mattress with bicarb and essential oils, using a cloth tied to a pan lid to scrub the stairs and adding soda crystals to towels before washing them. It went viral, gaining her an extra three million followers.
Snappy cleaning tips might be her forte, but Anna spends a lot of time researching and testing her hacks, based on follower requests (she says she spends four hours a week cleaning her own house, which looks immaculate in videos). Testing is necessary because when Anna posts a tip, she wants to know it works, and that’s led to some ingenious solutions, as I witness in my own home.
First up, there’s the microwave. Before Anna arrived, I placed my phone, facing upwards, inside and took a photo to send her, then nearly had a heart attack when I saw the layer of grime clinging to its ‘ceiling’. Have I seriously been putting my kids’ food in that? ‘I’ve seen worse,’ says Anna, and sets to work, slicing a lemon and putting the pieces in a bowl of water, before squeezing them to release the juice. She pops this in the microwave for three minutes on full power, telling me that the steam combined with the citric acid inside will cut through the grease. This is then left to stand for five minutes and voilà – wiping the muck off the microwave’s innards becomes easy.
Next is the oven. How often do you clean yours? There’s a funny Mumsnet thread where people confess it’s ‘once every year or two’ or ‘only when it stinks’, and admittedly I’m the same. A major part of the issue is I don’t actually know how to clean an oven, but Anna whips up a paste using bicarbonate of soda and washing-up liquid, which she smears on to the surfaces and leaves for half an hour. Again, this makes it much easier to scrub off all the grease from the oven walls. Anna also uses a tool that looks like a tiny ice scraper to tackle stubborn grit, telling me, ‘This was really cheap on Amazon, it’s useful for induction hobs, too.’
Indeed, a lesson I learn repeatedly during Anna’s three-hour cleaning session is that you don’t need to spend a fortune on expensive branded lotions and potions to clean. Instead, stick to simple products along with a few clever tools, such as the electric scrubber she uses to polish limescale off my shower grouting. My children both have eczema, so Anna opts for natural products, including a simple paste made from water and bicarbonate of soda to remove marks from the sofa (I could’ve sworn I banned the family from eating and drinking on it. Sigh). As for her number-one cleaning product? ‘You can clean almost anything in your house with washing-up liquid,’ she says. ‘You do not need to spend a lot of money.’
I’m keen to know if there is any part of the house you simply must clean every day. ‘The worst place for bacteria is the kitchen sink,’ says Anna. Most of us regularly wipe this down with a cloth, but the crucial step is then disinfecting the cloth every night, rather than wiping the same dirty rag around the bowl for days. ‘Run a shallow layer of water at the bottom of the sink, put your disinfectant in there and then add the cloth,’ advises Anna. Cloths should then be washed regularly at 60 degrees, so save them up to go with other items such as towels and bedding that need to be washed at a high temperature.
Anna is full of brilliant tips – she tells me to put a white plastic high chair outside in the sun to bleach off orange stains, throw ice cubes into a hot nonstick pan to lift off the grease, and take my make-up sponge into the shower with me to clean it without making a mess. I am quite frankly amazed when she squirts a blob of Gillette shaving foam on to the eyeshadow stains on my bedroom carpet, only to wipe it off after a couple of minutes to reveal they’ve completely disappeared (those marks have been there for at least six months).
When she posts about visiting my flat a couple of days later, Anna says that she ‘almost cried recording this voiceover’ because it ‘hit home… how motherhood can be a lot to juggle sometimes’. I certainly needn’t have worried about being judged.
Anna quit her job in 2023 to become a full-time influencer – she now makes the majority of her money through brand partnerships with the likes of Air Wick and B&M. However, in some ways she feels as if she hasn’t fully left her former career in education. ‘I’m still a teacher, just in a new classroom,’ she explains. That new classroom is Instagram, where a whole host of time-poor individuals are gratefully lapping up her lessons, one squirt of washing-up liquid at a time.
The 5 Minute Clean Routine by Anna Louisa is published by Century, £18.99. To order a copy for £16.14 until 15 June, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK P&P on orders over £25.
ANNA LOUISA’S TOP TOOLS
Comes with various attachments to help you clean sinks, shower screens, tiles, baths, hobs, ovens and floors.
Features special tech to separate the clean and dirty water, so you’re never wiping sludge around the floor.
Leaves surfaces, including windows, mirrors, shower screens, hobs, worktops, and tiles, dry and streak free.
This tool – which looks like a giant electric toothbrush – has various attachments to help clean grout, taps, shower heads and hard-to-reach places in appliances such as the washing machine and dishwasher.
