Regarding cleaning products: for mopping bathroom and kitchen floors, do you use a sponge mop and bucket? Or cloth mop? Or one of those wet Swiffer pads? If you use a bucket, what cleaner do you use in the water?
Do you prefer to sweep or vacuum floors? Or do you use Swiffer dry cloths? Or a combination?
And for dusting, I think you mentioned a feather duster – have you ever tried those Swiffer dusters? I really like those. Although I am sure using Swiffer products would get expensive compared to reusable products.
Oh my god, I was without a vacuum cleaner for a few years and it was miserable. I swept the carpets with a broom. To this day, vacuuming is my favorite chore.
elfkin: Obviously, you must crawl under the bed and suck on the cough drop until it comes free. Then, you have a clean carpet and a soothed throat.
Not the OP, but my experience is that wet Swiffer pads are OK for small areas that only need mopping as part of regular “maintenance” cleaning, but they get dirty fast otherwise. For a floor that hasn’t been cleaned in a while or gets a lot of dirty traffic (pets, dirty feet from outside, kids), I’d go with a mop that can be wrung out and reused.
If you keep a Swiffer mop around to take up spills on the spot, what I ended up doing was to Google for a pattern to knit a replacement cover. I knit a couple of those and just throw them in with the washcloths when I do the laundry.
Boy, you sure seem to like Swiffer products. Perhaps you should take a look at this thread… FH–I never thought of KNITTING a cover for the Swiffer mop! What a good idea! I wouldn’t mind springing for the wet Swiffer pads but the smell of the cleaner on them is gag-o-rific! I’ve tried to make my own covers from old towels, but that didn’t work particularly well.
I did it partially to use up some nastily rough cotton yarn I bought when I first restarted knitting, that “Peaches and Cream” or “Sugar and Cream” or whatever they call the stuff. Pure acrylic would be less absorbent but probably hold shape better, and be very scrubby. Maybe that’d work as an accent row added in to provide more scrubbing power.
Be prepared for a little trial and error - knit/crochet up something that’s firmly constructed, to keep from pulling it too far out of shape and bunching the thing up on one end of the mop head or something. I just use the built-in “grippers” and poke the fabric into them to keep it in place.
Oh, for the cleaner I usually just look up some kind of homemade floor cleaner (usually some variant on vinegar, water, and a tiny bit of soap) and fill the bottle myself - I have one of the Swiffer mops with the built-in bottle (which you’re supposed to swap out for a fresh new bottle) and tubing down to a sprayer that spritzes the floor when you pull the trigger. I heard that the new versions may not have refillable bottles, so word to the wise there.
Coming up next, “How to crochet a doily to cover that thing in the corner”.
I saw an episode of Hoarders and it was disturbing, not least because I have had that tendency. After looking at the Hoarders website, I think I might have reached a toe into class two (“clutter with paths, but nothing rotting”) at the most, and that was in the old room in Oakville before I moved to a real apartment.
Do professional cleaners have special tools/solutions/etc not available to civilians? I ask this because I am unable to get my bathtub clean. I don’t know whether it’s permanently abraded or what, but there is soap scum/scale that I just cannot remove, even though everything around it yields to sufficient elbow grease.
Is there a book or, better yet, a website with this information, but less preaching? I’d like to find the basic information on housekeeping I never learned. I read the Amazon preview of the first few pages of Home Comforts, and it seems rather preachier about the importance of housekeeping than I’d like. Also, my sense of self-worth is totally independent of the state of my house, and I’d like to keep it that way- nothing about how I don’t love or respect myself because my house is messy, thanks. I’d like a housekeeping resource, hold the preaching and the self-love bit. I don’t need crafting advice, either- I don’t do crafts. I do need an attitude of “every little bit helps”, not a perfectionist attitude a la Martha Stewart. Is there anything like that out there?
I have to say then, avoid the FlyLady stuff like your life depends on it. That is soooo far into that territory that it frightens me, and I do like Home Comforts a lot. (I think the foreword of HC where the author explains her point of view helps me understand her better.) FlyLady gets brought up a lot in discussions like this, and I simply could not handle her after a while. She has some great basic ideas but the description of her material gets bogged down in taking pride in your homemaking/home cleaning abilities. I think if someone could take the best of those two authors and distill them down into a concise guide, they’d make a mint.
Rilchiam, sorry for derailing your thread with my arts-and-crafts project advice.
That’s actually the specific person I had in mind when I wrote that. Finally Loving Yourself? You actually like yourself better because your house is clean? That’s pathetic.
Sorry, I forgot about this. Okay, light cleaning would be the kind of thing I did with Merry Maids: dusting, mopping, wiping the mirrors, and all in a house that’s already a museum and you just want to keep it that way. edium is when you come in, do the dishes and laundry, reassemble the children’s rooms and generally hold back the tide. And heavy would be like, when you go into the laundry room and there’s a puddle of petrified detergent that no one’s tried to shift in years. But those are just my definitions.
nyctea: I usually clean bathroom floors by hand, since they tend to be too small, with too many fixtures to work around, for a mop to be of any use. Kitchen and other large floors do get the mop treatment, though I’ve been known to get on hands and knees and remove crusted dirt from the edges, using a sponge or even a toothbrush. I spray the floor with all-purpose cleaner as go along, I use Top Job in the water, and I use a roller mop; the kind you can squeeze out as you go. Cloth mops won’t do. Then I rinse with clean water.
I don’t especially care for Swiffer either. I will use it on a wooden floor if it’s the only way to avoid damage, but I don’t find it to be the miracle product others do. I came by the feather duster through trial and error, and it serves me far too well to switch.
Sunspace, I think they do. I accepted a long time ago that I was never going to get a polyurethane tub to look like new. I could remove all the dirt and germs, but it would always look its age. Whatever happened to porcelain tubs that glistened after one go-over with Comet?
Anne–so were you thinking of Home Comforts or this fly lady person. Because I didn’t find Home Comforts preachy at all.
I don’t know of any good online sources, but I’d be interested in some. The Jeff Campbell books look pretty good and the advice seems pragmatic. I’m probably going to get them.
I think Rilch should research all this stuff for us and make some recommendations!
C’mon, this is the SDMB! Be glad the thread didn’t drift into “how do you clean sex toys” or something.
A few months ago, Fiance and I were in Target buying a new broom, and they had stiff plastic-bristled brushes – on long broom handles! No more scrubbing on my hands and knees if I let the kitchen floor go too long. I love that thing. We clean so rarely that I have a 3-part technique for the kitchen floors:
Sweep
Scrub with floor cleanser
Mop up the dirt with wrung-out Swiffer pads, changing frequently. (It took 8 when I cleaned last Wednesday.)
Coolio! I will absolutely be knitting some Swiffer covers this winter.
Both, as examples of different things I want to avoid.
The intro to Home Comforts talked about how housekeeping is important to the way you experience life in your home, and how terrible it is that people don’t take housekeeping as seriously as her grandmothers did. I don’t want that. I’m not interested in “increasing the feeling of having a home and its comforts”. I want my house to be pretty much the same as it is now, only a bit cleaner.
What I really want is an analogue to the “Microsoft Access for Dummies” book I got when I needed to learn Access for work (or like other computing books I’ve read). Nothing in there about how you’re a terrible person if you don’t use MS Access. Nothing about how Access will change your life. Just stuff you can do with Access and how to do it. I want a housekeeping book or site like that- what you should do, and how to do it. Ideally, it would also have some of the science that goes into it, or at least give experiment more weight than tradition in deciding what should be done and how.
What about, say, scrubbing kitchen floor (on hands and knees, because it’s got a lot of whirls and a pattern that has a bit of volume to it). And grout scrubbing in a bathroom? And vacuuming? Would the number of bathrooms (5) affect the “duty”?
Yeah, grout scrubbing is definitely “heavy.” And so is that floor, if it really needs painstaking attention. Vacuuming can be light or medium, but with five bathrooms* it all adds up to heavy.
Do you quote squalor recovery jobs in advance? How do you calculate how many hours it would take?
My parents are hoarders, sort of. They don’t save toilet rolls or anything, but stuff just tends to . . . accumulate. Piles of papers and newspapers get put to one side to be dealt with later and they just build up. They seem to be incapable of throwing away books, even if they’ve been chewed by the dog, sprayed on by the cat and left in the corner of the toilet for six months. They also breed cats as a hobby and have two large dogs. None of the animals live in the house permanently but they all spend a bit of time there and the storage and preparation of that much pet food causes quite a mess.
I fantasise about going back for a visit and giving the house a really good clean, but then get intimidated by just how long it would take to sort, throw away, tidy and then finally clean.
Yep, every bedroom has its own ensuite bathroom (it was set up that way - I think it may have been a bed & breakfast in the early 1900’s) and two powder rooms. But really only 3 are used daily.
That’s what I figured, in terms of being “heavy duty”. That helps so much, thanks!
Great thread Rilchiam, thank you. How long does it take you to do a squalor job? From your descriptions of what all you do, it sounds like it could take weeks to do an average size house with a stage 2 or so of squalor, especially working so closely with your clients as you do. What’s the longest a job has ever taken?
And another random cleaning hint request: what’s the best way to clean hardwood floors? I’m about to have wood floors installed and I’m not sure how best to deal with the dog hair and the dirt and stuff we track in, plus the spills and dropped yogurt containers etc. in the kitchen. Any tips?
