As long as the weather’s nice you won’t want to be indoors much at all let alone doing your house cleaning while the rest of your family and friends play outside or go to the beach in summer.

Here are a few tips to make sure that your house stays reasonably clean and tidy but you still don’t get to Autumn and find the Summer’s over and you never got round to enjoying the weather as much as you planned.

First of all prepare, if you are going to spring clean leave it until towards the end of the spring so less will build up by the time summer starts. Clean and dust as well as getting your oven, fridge and other appliances clean.

If you have children they are likely to spend a lot of the summer outside and so bedrooms may have a chance of staying a little more tidy, but start tidy and there’s a better chance they won’t just dump things as they come in and out.  Also before the summer comes pack away winter things, things you don’t use in summer including clothes just get in the way and create more work for you.

One of the biggest summer cleaning jobs is keeping floors clean, with people coming in and out a lot and bringing in dust, dirt and grass floors can suffer. Choose one main way in and out of your home and get people to stick to it. By doing this you will have less floors to clean, ideally it will be the way in closest to your kitchen and a bathroom, which are the main things people come in for. You may want to get out summer toys and games for the garden though and keep them close by the door or in a shed to make them more easily accessible without people having to traipse around the house.

Doormats are good but you’ll have to be strict to make sure people use them. If you are having a lot of people over you could have a runner going from the door to the garden to the bathroom and kitchen to keep carpets clean, this could even be old cardboard that you throw out at the end of the day: this is especially important if you have a pool and will have wet people coming in and out as well.

Think about what parts of your home will see the most use during the summer too, it may be easier to move objects likely to get dirty or damaged out of the way until the summer is over.

Then of course if this still seems too much you can take your family for days out: as long as there’s no one at home they can’t make mess meaning you don’t have to chase after them and keep things tidy. Days at the beach or at a park are great and if friends invite you to garden parties accept: you could even take it in turns with friends to have each other’s children over so they can only make a mess at one place at a time.