How to Easily Clean Up from a Home Remodeling Project
Remodeling just one room in your house is easier to clean up because you can keep the mess pretty much isolated. If you keep the doors closed and lay down old rugs or thick towels at the bottom of them, it will help keep plaster and wood dust contained to that one area. Door-less rooms can also be isolated by hanging old blankets in the doorway. Just make sure the blankets hang clear to the floor. Then, spray the blankets until they’re just damp with a spray bottle of tap water. The water will hold and trap dust particles so they don’t spread over the rest of your house.
And, don’t forget to close and cover furnace/AC registers with old rugs as well. This will help keep dust out of your ductwork. If your furnace or air conditioning unit is running, it will also help prevent the spreading of dust completely through your house!
To easily clean up from a home remodeling project, don’t let messes accumulate. Ideally, wood and other materials will be cut outdoors. But, that’s not always possible, especially if the weather’s bad or the area being remodeled isn’t close to an outside exit. So you can have sawdust and other byproducts of sawing inside your house.
Clean up material scraps such as wood and plaster, as you go along. Large pieces can simply be picked up by hand. You can clean up small pieces of scraps with a broom and dustpan. But, don’t sweep the broom around with too much energy, or you’ll end up filling the air with dust! Instead, gently sweep up the worst of the mess with the broom. Or, if the pile is rather large, use a scoop shovel and a giant trash bag.
Then, to remove dust and dirt, use a wet/dry vacuum. Don’t try to use your upright vacuum cleaner, and don’t use a RainbowÃ?® vacuum cleaner either. Even though a Rainbow can suck up many kinds of wet and dry messes, plaster dust does bad things to its motor. Picking up nails, screws and other fasteners with your upright will ruin it as well.
To easily clean up from a home remodeling project, don’t try to clean up light dust with a feather duster or a dry dust cloth. Both of these tools will just spread the dust around in the air. The best tool to use is a damp rag. Turn it over once one side gets soiled, and rinse it out when the whole rag is full of dust.
