How to Be a Lean, Green, Cleaning Machine
Here are a few tips.
A Partial Daily Cleaning is Better than a Weekly Thorough Cleaning
Most of us have been trained to clean on a weekly schedule. The trouble is that this can put a major monkey wrench in our busy schedules, and if you miss a week, the dirt can really build up. It’s much better to clean a little at a time. After all, you wouldn’t let the dirt build up on your body for a whole week, and then spend three hours on a Sunday washing it off. It just doesn’t make sense.
One trick I found on the web was to clean things almost every time you use them. Now this might sound effort intensive, but actually it’s not. You don’t do a really intensive job of cleaning with this method. Just a quick once over is fine. I keep sponges by the bathroom counters and in the shower so that I can do a quick pass right after I finish using them.
With this method, even if you miss a bunch of cleanings, you’re very likely to find that your house gets cleaner and stays cleaner than if you adhered to a strict weekly schedule.
Try to devote an hour a day to cleaning. Attack problem areas like kitchen counters, the kitchen sink, the kitchen table, the kitchen floor, bathroom counters, bathroom sinks and the shower floor and glass door every day without fail.
Then don’t clean anything else unless you notice that it’s gotten dirty. Then don’t wait a few days or a week to clean it. Clean that problem area as soon as you have the time to do it.
Then, you can always set aside a day every once in a while, say once a week or once a month, to look around the house and see what you missed, and give the house a more thorough and complete cleaning. On these days pay special attention to the toilets and the floors, as these tend to be major problem areas.
If you regularly clean one hour per day, you will end up cleaning seven hours per week, but it won’t feel like you spent seven hours. In order to devote the same amount of time weekly, you’d have to devote seven hours all in one day,v most likely on the weekend, to cleaning. That’s an entire workday for most people. Nobody wants to lose one whole day of their weekend to cleaning, only to see their work ruined the very next day. If you’re just more efficient about cleaning, you won’t have to.
Don’t Use Expensive, Toxic, Store-Bought Cleansers to Clean Your Home
We’ve all been duped into believing that we need chemicals to keep our homes clean. It’s absolutely untrue. The grand majority of the cleaning that needs to be done in our homes can be done with baking soda and vinegar. Every now and then you might need to break out a degreaser, but just about any liquid soap product will do. I’ve regularly used dish soap and laundry detergent to clean my entire home. I’ve even used shampoo in a pinch.
This way you won’t be replacing the dirt in your home with a toxic soup which is even dirtier, in a different way. The air in our homes can be more than 70 times more polluted than the outside air, and these toxic spray cleansers are a big part of the problem.
The only chemical you will ever really need is bleach. And this can be used frugally and sporadically, only when there’s a real problem that calls for it. Every now and then, for example, you’ll want to put a little bleach in your toilet bowl, and let it rest there with the bowl brush in the bowl. This will help to kill the germs that tend to accumulate. But don’t use it every day, as all this will do is create a toxic environment in your bathroom. Most of the time, baking soda will clean your toilet bowl very efficiently.
Don’t Use Disposable Towels or Cloths
Disposable towels or cleaning cloths are expensive, unnecessary, and pollute our planet by filling up landfills. Many of them are made from paper, so using them destroys trees. Recycled products also use up energy, and have to be disposed of.
Instead, use old rags, like cut up socks, t-shirts and other clothing that has become too holey and threadbare to be useful any other way.
I use these to clean just about everything I wouldn’t use a sponge for. I clean windows with vinegar and water in a spray bottle, and wipe it away with one of my son’s old white socks which I cut open. I also place the old socks on my Swiffer, with the terry cloth side facing out. I often use my husband’s old work socks, which are black, because it makes it easier to see the dirt I got up off the floor.
I also use the dark cloths for dusting. Try to wet the cloth or the surface to be cleaned with a little vinegar and water, so that the dust doesn’t get stirred up into the air.
I use nicer kitchen cloths to clean the kitchen counter and table. First I go over the surface with the sponge, then do a second pass with the cloth to dry it off. I also save old kitchen sponges that have outlived their usefulness to clean up nasty spills that I wouldn’t want to use the good cloths or sponges for, but that the rags won’t address. You’ll need to wash these periodically in the clotheswasher.
Nuke Your Sponges
Every now and then you might notice that the kitchen sponge begins to smell. Wet it a little, and put it in the microwave for one minute. Be sure to keep several sponges on the kitchen sink. That way, if one sponge is full of soap, you won’t have to wring it out ten times just to wipe down the kitchen counter. If you’re nuking more than one sponge at a time, increase the cook time to one minute per sponge. The sponges will last longer, and you won’t spread germs all over the kitchen every time you clean up.
Get a Hoky
Hokies are manual carpet sweepers which can pick up debris off the floor. These are very handy if you don’t want to get out the big vacuum, or are trying to save electricity, or avoid waking a sleeping husband or baby. Use them in between vacuumings. My husband picked one up for free at a garage sale. They’re also available online, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one in your local grocery or hardware store.
Use the Vacuum to Clean Bare Floors
If you’re short on time, the vacuum cleaner can really help you to clean your bare floors more quickly and efficiently. Be sure to get a vacuum cleaner that can sweep the bare floors without an attachment. I picked up a quality vacuum cleaner at a garage sale for $10, right up the street from where I live. The cleaner was the kind that sells new for around $100, and had barely been used, but the previous owner had carelessly broken it and failed to repair it. I looked at it and sure enough, the only thing that had broken was the brush roller, and that had been removed. The cleaner seemed fine in every other respect. I ran up to my local vacuum cleaner repair shop and bought a new roller and belt, and installed them myself. In a few minutes I had a perfectly good bagless lightweight vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter for under $40. Its bare floor setting permits me to vacuum my bare floors quickly and easily, and does a great job.
Buy a Carpet Shampooer
Carpet shampooers are worth their weight in gold. They will save you a small fortune on having a professional come in and clean your carpets for you. They’re very handy in an emergency, for example when the toilet overflows, or somebody spills red Kool Aid on the carpet. I like to do a whole-house shampoo just before I move into a new house. Then I shampoo high traffic areas when they seem like they really need it. I don’t usually need to do a whole house shampoo more often than once every six months or so.
Clean a Room at a Time
The room at a time method is an extremely efficient and effective cleaning method if you’ve got plenty of time. If you’ve set aside a day for a more thorough cleaning, this method can help you organize your cleaning. One way to do it is to start in one room and clean the whole thing top to bottom, and not move on to the next room until everything in that room is finished. Then you move straight on to the next room.
Another way to do it is to clean one room one day. Then clean the next room another day. Each day devote your time to a different room. This is best if you’re extremely busy and too strapped for time to clean the house all at once. This rotation method can also keep your house looking cleaner, since there will never be a time when the whole house is filthy.
Take Advantage of “Dead Time” to Clean
If you’re waiting for something that takes a while to complete, take advantage of the time to clean up a little. I like to clean up the cooking mess while the food is cooking. Set your timer so that the food doesn’t burn. If your computer just won’t do anything else while software is downloading or the virus scanner is running, this might be a good time to dust the shelves. If you had to shut down, and restart, take a moment to vacuum. You’d be surprised how effective five minutes here and there is at getting your home spic and span. The great part of this method is you won’t “feel” like you’ve been cleaning. Instead, the cleaning will fit seamlessly into your life, like little cleaning “breaks.”
Spot Clean
This is another very useful trick if you’re strapped for time. You go around the house and look for only the areas that have a major mess. For example, if there’s a sticky spot on the floor in the kitchen, clean that spot. Look around for other areas that are particularly messy, and clean them. Then sweep and swiff. This is very quick and easy, and can help you put off mopping until later.
Similarly, if you see that the living room coffee table is very messy, and the living room floor is covered with debris, just clean that table and vacuum the floor in the living room only. This can give the high-traffic room a quick face lift, without having to spend inordinate amounts of time cleaning the whole house.
Don’t Rinse Your Dishes in the Sink
Rinsing dishes in the sink or prewashing them before loading the dishwasher just wastes time and water. Instead of rinsing in the sink, load the dishes into the dishwasher straight from the table. When you’ve got a sufficient number in there, run a rinse cycle. Rinse the dishes in the dishwasher once or twice a day until you’re ready to wash them. You’ll save water and time, and the sink will be available for washing dishes that need to be washed by hand.
Make Your Husband and Children Do Part of the Work
Your husband and kids make most of the messes, and yet I suspect that they probably never do any of the cleaning. Housecleaning is too big a job for just one person, and it’s a job that’s never done. Given that they probably make the majority of the messes, they should at least chip in with the cleaning. Enlist their help with clearing the table after dinner, and cleaning up their own rooms. If they’ve been working on a project, insist that they tidy up after themselves. Even with their help, you’re probably going to end up doing the lion’s share of the cleaning, so don’t feel guilty for making them do a little to help you out.
Following these instructions will keep your house cleaner every single day, and will leave you with more time for shopping, cooking, earning extra money on the side, spending time with family and friends and all the other things that you need and want to do.
