How to keep the house hygienic: advice for keeping your house clean

Préserver l'hygiène de sa maison

Love it or hate is, cleaning is a fact of life - and no matter how much you loathe rubbering up in those marigolds, we'll bet you'll loathe bacteria and germs even more. 

Hygiene in our homes is more important than ever - especially as we spend a shamefully large amount of our time in our homes - in Europe we're home around 75% of the time. Is that too much?

With Skype, the internet and mobile phones making it all too easy to stay at home, we might as well make sure they're clean.

Making sure your home isn't contaminated with ghastly germs is hard work - and means a lot more elbow grease than simply pouring bleach down the blog. 

At sofeminine HQ a show of hands told us that cleaning is one of our worst ways to spend a weekend, but when you know a lil' more about bacteria, slaving away for an hour or two suddenly becomes much more appealing. 

Bacteria are tiny living organisms, invisible to the naked eye yet present all around us, in the air, the ground, in fabrics and on our skin.

While we do in fact need some types of bacteria (in the intestine to aid digestion, or to produce certain foods, like sauerkraut or yoghurt) some, so-called pathogenic bacteria can cause illnesses which have serious health risks.

If you're ready to learn what bacteria beasts lurk in your home, then read on for a room by room account of where bacteria can be bothersome, and importantly how to blitz it.