Cleaning with Limited Mobility: Smart Strategies for a Spotless Home

Life in Chicago moves fast. Between work, family, and trying to enjoy everything our city has to offer, keeping your home spotless can feel like a full-time job you just don’t have time for. If you’re juggling a busy schedule, you know the struggle is real. But what if cleaning is physically challenging, too? Whether due to a temporary injury, chronic pain, or mobility limitations, maintaining a clean space can be even more daunting. The good news is, with the right strategies, you can reclaim your home—and your time.

Cleaning is a universal task, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all activity. For many, physical limitations can turn routine chores into significant hurdles. This guide is designed to provide practical, empathetic strategies to make cleaning more manageable, efficient, and less painful—because everyone deserves a clean and comfortable home.

1. Organize for Easy Access

The first step to easier cleaning is setting up a system that works for you. If bending, reaching, or carrying is difficult, your supplies should be within easy reach and simple to identify.

• Color-Code & Label Clearly: Use different colored cloths for the kitchen, bathroom, and dusting. Label spray bottles in large, easy-to-read print so you or anyone helping knows what to use where.
• Ditch the Heavy Caddy: Instead of a bulky carrying caddy, opt for a rolling cart with multiple shelves. It’s far easier to clean your apartment when you can glide your supplies from room to room without lifting.

2. Create Satellite Cleaning Kits

If moving around your entire home in one go is exhausting, don’t. Create smaller, dedicated cleaning kits for key areas like the bathroom and kitchen.

• Use small, lightweight spray bottles (like those used by hairdressers) to avoid the strain of squeezing large triggers.
• Stock each kit with essentials: a small box of baking soda, a roll of paper towels, and a few microfiber cloths. Park these kits where you need them most.

This way, the tools are right there when you need them, eliminating trips back and forth. For a more thorough refresh, consider deep cleaning help from a trusted Chicago cleaning company.

3. Let Your Appliances Do the Work

Your dishwasher and washing machine are powerful allies. Use them to clean more than just dishes and clothes.

Dishwasher Hacks:

• Clean small, durable items like plastic toys, hairbrushes, or bathroom loofahs. Place them in a delicates bag on the top rack.
• For items you don’t want to wash with detergent (like certain plastics), run a hot-water-only cycle.

Washing Machine Hacks:

• Throw sneakers, yoga mats, or washable pet beds into a cold, gentle cycle inside a delicates bag.

Leveraging appliances saves energy and strain. When bigger tasks loom, fast cleaning services can handle the heavy lifting.

4. Choose the Right Tools & Seek Professional Advice

The right tool changes everything. Look for extended-reach dusters, lightweight vacuums, electric scrubbers, and tools on wheels to minimize bending and repetitive motion.

Most Importantly: Always consult your doctor or occupational therapist first. They understand your specific limitations and can recommend safe movements and potentially life-changing assistance programs. Sometimes, the best strategy is to schedule a cleaning with a professional home cleaning service to handle what you can’t.

5. Adjust Your Expectations & Pace Yourself

Injury and chronic conditions require us to be kinder to ourselves. It’s okay if your home doesn’t look like a magazine spread every day.

• Chunk Your Tasks: Figure out how long you can comfortably clean before fatigue or pain sets in—maybe it’s 10 or 15 minutes. That’s your cleaning block. Clean the bathroom sink one day, the toilet the next.
• Celebrate Small Wins: Focus on what you can accomplish. A clean countertop or a vacuumed rug is a victory.

If keeping up feels impossible, remember that cleaning services in Chicago exist to provide that consistent, reliable support.

6. Declutter to Simplify

Less stuff means less to clean, move, and manage. Decluttering can feel overwhelming, so start small—one drawer or shelf at a time. Enlist a friend, family member, or a professional organizer to help. A clearer space is easier and safer to navigate and makes any apartment cleaning much quicker.

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

This might be the hardest but most important step. Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

• Reach out to your community for specific tasks like lifting, reaching high shelves, or moving furniture.
• Get creative with bartering if hiring someone to clean my apartment isn’t in the budget. Trade a skill you have for the physical help you need.

And of course, professional cleaning service near me options are designed for this exact purpose—to be the help you can count on. You can easily book an appointment and let experts get your space cleaned to your standards.

In North America, about 12% of the population identifies as having some sort of mobility issue that limits their ability to move through the world as an able-bodied person would. And you know what? That can make a lot of things hard, from getting a coffee to getting into a car. But something that it makes really challenging is cleaning. And this is something that we don’t often think about or talk about, which is why at Clean My Space, I decided to make a video all about how to clean if you have limited mobility. Now, this is the first video in a two-part series. I’m going to talk about techniques and strategies in this one and specific product and tool recommendations in the next one, which brings me to my next point, which is, if you’re new here, welcome to Clean My Space. My name is Melissa Maker. I’m an accidental cleaning expert, which means that I’m always looking for the most efficient and effective way to get your cleaning done right the first time. So, if you haven’t done so, make sure that you subscribe. And if you do, you’ll see the second video come up in your feed as well. So, if cleaning is difficult for you because you struggle with repetitive motion, moving a certain joint, you get really exhausted really quickly, or you can’t move your body in a certain way. I’ve got routines and strategies and techniques that can really help you. Let’s get into it. Keep your supplies organized and easy to reach. You want to make sure that what you need is accessible. So, what that can look like is that your items are colorcoded, your cloths, so you know what’s for the kitchen, what’s for the bathroom, and that products are clearly labeled in large print. That way, you or anyone else who’s coming in to help you clean knows what to use what product for. I also don’t love the use of caddies for someone who has mobility issues or chronic pain because it’s actually heavy and chunky and sort of difficult to maneuver and store. So instead, you would want to look for something that has wheels like one of those triple carts that you can sort of push around and move around. This is great not only for storing and keeping your supplies organized, but also if you’re doing a larger clean, you can load up the various shelves with different things that you need and take it around from place to place. It’s much easier to roll something than to carry something. If movement around the house is challenging, you might find that you prefer using satellite cleaning kits or smaller cleaning kits that you park in the key spaces around your home. So, one of the things that you can do when you’re creating these kits, and I’m not generally a fan of decanting products, but you can get yourself smaller spray bottles, especially if the weight of a spray bottle is difficult or the repetitive motion of squeezing a large trigger bottle is challenging for you. So, you can find those smaller spray bottles that hairdressers use. They’re about 4 ounces instead of a larger bottle that’s 16. It also is easier to store in a smaller space like a bathroom. You can also include products in tools like small boxes of baking soda, a roll of paper towel, a few folded microfiber cloths, and make your kit easily accessible, easy to reach. So that way, if you need to do cleaning, you don’t have to worry about going and finding your larger cleaning kit. You can just use what you have and replenish as necessary. If you have a dishwasher and or a washing machine, there are a lot of things that these two appliances can clean for you so that you don’t have to do the cleaning. What I would recommend if you’re going to place items in the dishwasher, first you want to make sure that they are dishwasher safe. So, anything that’s made out of hard plastic typically is fine. Of course, glass is fine. Again, you just want to check and make sure that your item is generally safe for dishwasher. Now, if you’re going to be using this, what you can do if the items are really small, is you can get a delicates bag, like what you would use for laundry, and put those small items, I’m thinking like Legos, for example, and you can put those into the bag, put those in the top rack of the dishwasher, and run it through on a regular cycle. If it’s something that you want to clean, but you don’t necessarily want to use dishwasher detergent to clean, you can omit the detergent and just run through a hot water wash for that particular load, if you will. So, I’m thinking in this case, small bathroom implements like your lofah, etc. You can also use your washing machine to clean things like your shoes. So, if you notice that your shoes are a little bit dirty, you can put them into the washing machine. Again, you can use a delicates bag to keep them contained. Run through a cycle. In this case, you can use detergent and then pull them out. There are plenty of other things that you can clean in both the dishwasher and the washing machine safely. And I have a video all about how to use your dishwasher, which I will put right here for you. As I always recommend with any cleaning job, you have to know the products, tools, and techniques before you get to work. And in this case, I want to make sure that you’re using the right tools because tools can make a huge difference in how difficult or easy a cleaning job can be. And there are plenty of cleaning tools that are available or can be adapted uh to help make cleaning easier and more efficient for someone who has limited mobility or deals with chronic pain. So, that’s why we’re putting together a whole separate video on that. It’s going to include things like tools on extended poles, electric tools that can really help, tools that are on wheels, tons of stuff. So, I really want to make sure that you tune in for that. But, I didn’t want to put this video together without including this little chunk. I want to make it clear that none of this advice comes ahead of what your doctor or your occupational therapist has to say. And I really think if you haven’t done so, you should consult with them and let them help you understand what your limitations are as well as what you’re able to do. And then this video here can kind of help inform your strategies once you’ve had that conversation. The other thing I think is really important uh as part of your conversation with those two professionals is to find out if there are any government assistance programs that might be available to you that you don’t know of. And you can also just do a quick online search to look into these programs. You might not know about them. And even though it’s annoying to spend some time doing that research, in my opinion, the results are worth it if you can have a paid aid come in and help you with some of these tasks, it was worth your time. Reconsider or manage your expectations when you’re in this situation. So, I’ll tell you a quick story. In 2020, I dislocated my right shoulder and it was very painful but also a very humbling experience. You know, whenever someone loses mobility, whether it’s temporary or permanent, you have to ask for help. It’s emotional. Uh it’s difficult when you have to sort of reassess how you moved through life and now you can’t do the things you used to do. It’s really difficult and a lot of it um has to come from the inside as well as the physical things that we do on the outside. So consider this. Look at what your expectations are that you are having right now. Maybe something that you’re upset about. You’re like, I wish I could do this. I used to be able to do this. And wind it back and say, this is what I’m able to do. And go easy on yourself because this is a transition. And this is something that requires some acceptance and a little bit of change. So reconsider what it is that you do at home and what your expectations are of how your home should look or feel. And then think about what makes sense for your body given where you are now. And look for ways to readjust those expectations so that you don’t feel bad and you don’t feel stressed and so that your body can do what you need it to do. When cleaning, you want to make sure that you’re pacing yourself so that you don’t burn out, exhaust yourself, harm yourself, or cause any additional pain. And trust me, you don’t need any extra pain, especially when it comes to cleaning, which is already a pain. So, what this looks like is figuring out how long you can work for in a period of time before you feel tired or in pain. And that should be your cue to stop. So, let’s say it’s 15 minutes. Well, then you know you have to chunk your cleaning down into 15minute tasks. So what that might look like is the bathroom sink and counter get done one day, the toilet gets done another day, the tub gets done another day. And once you kind of figure that out, you can build somewhat of a cleaning schedule around that. And by pacing yourself, you feel like you’re accomplishing something and that you’re working within what your body is able and comfortable doing. And that way you don’t feel bad. you actually feel accomplished. General life advice is living with less makes things easier. The less clutter, the less stuff we have, the less we have to move around, the less we have to maintain, the less we have to clean. And this sentiment applies to this topic as well. If you find that you have a lot of clutter in your home or a lot of stuff in your home that has to be moved around, that’s going to make cleaning more difficult for you. So, consider beginning the process of decluttering. And if that’s something that feels overwhelming or daunting, maybe that’s where you can ask for some help from a friend, family member, or an aid, because once you can get rid of that clutter and the stuff that you don’t need, especially if it’s large or bulky items, it’s going to make cleaning and maneuvering around your space so much easier. It can be really hard to ask for help. And again, going back to my shoulder example, I’m usually a very efficient person and I like to get everything done, but I had to just ask because it was too hard and too painful for me to do the things that I was so used to doing. And again, as I mentioned earlier, it was a humbling experience. But I want to encourage you to ask for help. If there’s something that’s really difficult for you, whether it’s lifting, moving, reaching, bending down, a specific cleaning or decluttering task, ask. because you never know who’s going to show up for you and how people can help you. And look, if someone doesn’t have the time or doesn’t want to do it free of charge and you don’t have the funds to pay them, you can look for ways that you can barter services with them. Perhaps you’re a really great editor. You can review something that they’ve written or you can help them with a little bit of work, some virtual assistant work, etc. And you can exchange time that way. Get creative, but definitely make sure that you open yourself up and ask for some help. Of course, I’m always here for you. You could use Clean MySpace as a resource to help you figure out how to clean just about anything. Whether it’s our book, our website, our YouTube channel, Instagram account, I’ve got tons of cleaning information here for you. And I’ve also got an amazing comment section and an amazing community here at Clean MySpace. So, if you have any specific questions that you want to ask about cleaning with limited mobility or chronic pain, put them in the comment section down below. And then if you’re watching this, read the comments down below. And if you have an answer, help someone out and let them know what you do to make things easier. And that brings me to this week’s comment question, which is, what cleaning task do you find the most challenging? Let us know your story in the comments down below. If you want help with all things cleaning, I’ve got solutions to your cleaning problems. You can subscribe to the Dirty Dish, which is our newsletter. I’ve got a link to that down below, and it comes to your inbox every single week. If you like what we do here at Clean MySpace, you can also consider becoming a member. Now, if you’re looking for ways to not have to work as hard when you clean, and by the way, who isn’t? You’re going to love this video. It’s all about different things you can clean overnight without really having to lift a finger. Seven overnight cleaning hacks right over here. If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe to the Clean My Space channel. Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next