Cleaing Tips for Wood Floors

My wood floors are a mess! We ripped the carpet out and then didn't finish the floors underneath. Hopefully we can get to that this Spring. In the meantime, here is a good article on cleaning hard wood floors.

Flylady

Well, I have decided to become a FlyLady again. I have not been able to clean the way I had hoped to because of a lack of motivation and direction. I am afraid I will lose my neat-freak inclinations and give in to my slobbishness if I don't do something quick to get going in the right direction.

Flylady.com is a website that offers to help you take baby-steps to a more in-control lifestyle. I joined once before, a few years ago. The first task is to clean your sink so it is shiny and free of dishes. Supposedly this gives you a sense of accomplishment whenever you walk into your kitchen. I can testify that it does feel good if you make an honest effort to clean it, with the steps they suggest (polishing it and everything!). The only problem I had last time was I got a lot of emails and this is difficult if you are not a stay-at-home person! I am gonna try it again, though, in good faith.

If you are in need of a good program that has been utilized by many and has hundreds of fans, try it out and see if it works for you. It can't hurt and at the least you will have a clean kitchen sink!

Valentine's Day Presents?

Well if you are a man I have some advice for you- do not get your wife, girlfriend, whoever any kind of cleaning supply for Valentine's Day! A new vacuum, dishwasher, is not a gift for her it is a gift for the both of you! It is not even really a gift but an investment in a clean house.

Do you want to know what would actually be much appreciated and very romantic to some women? If you cleaned the whole house today as a gift for her! Better yet, make a coupon book up of things you can do for her and let her cash them in anytime she is particularly tired after a long day. Clean the whole house coupons, clean her car coupons, clean the bathroom coupons, make a meal, etc. Now if you are lucky like I am your partner already does those things all year round! If you are a respectable man and already do your part around the house, it still wouldn't hurt to come home to a sparkling clean house. If you are a woman reading this, you can sneak over to your boyfriends house and do all his laundry and clean his house! Perhaps make a nice dinner for him. The same goes for same-sex couples. Everyone appreciates someone else doing all their stinking chores for them!

Green Cleaning Tips

I would like to introduce you to the concept of Green Cleaning. The "green" movement means that you incorporate products and actions into your life that help save and protect the environment. There are so many ways to live green, whether you buy your loved one free-trade Chocolates for Valentine's Day or you use cleaners in your house that will protect your health and the environment.

Here are some "green" cleaning tips from this above mentioned article:

- use home recipes for making cleaning solvents (good article on this here)
- look for hydrogen peroxide bleaches and leave on for 10 minutes
- don't use any products that say "corrosive" on the bottle!
- don't be afraid to call the 1-800 number on the bottle and ask specific questions like, "Is this product safe for people with asthma?" and such and demand a satisfactory answer!

Some other tips:
- open a window as the first step for cleaning! Fresh air can make all the difference!
- in general, buy cleaning products from a health-food store if all else fails.
- Use The Safe Shopper's Guide for purchasing products.

Green cleaning items include:

• Baking soda
• White vinegar
• Murphy's liquid soap (or liquid castile soap)
• Scouring pad
• Cotton washcloth or a sponge
• Cotton rag without much lint
• 16 oz. spray bottle

Try to incorporate Green living into your home, especially the way you clean it. Even thinking of this lifestyle conjures up images of wide open windows and laundry air-drying on the line outside. Try it yourself, sit and think for a second of what living a green lifestyle would look like to you (leave a comment!). What a nice lifestyle to try to emulate!

Clean the whole house every day!

You may not have realized it, but this blog is for readers who have a hard time keeping their life clean and organized, not people who are already really good at being clean. You won't find any neat-freaks here, unless you are actually a neat freak under all those piles of clutter and grime!

With that being said, you may not really understand how to keep your house clean all the time while still having time for anything else. I don't. The people I know who have beautiful, clean houses never seem to be cleaning. They always seem to be out eating lunch with friends, or shopping, or at a class, or watching a movie with their family. When in the hell do they clean, anyway? For me, cleaning has always seemed like a full-time job! Maybe that's because I let all my cleaning chores get piled up so that it would take a huge all-day project to get everything looking good?

I did a little research for you and found an article that may shed some light on those people who seem to have everything in their house under control. The program is called the Real Simple "Keep-It-Clean Plan". Supposedly you can clean your house every day and keep it clean using only 20 minutes a day! This seems like a really good technique, and the way it works is if you actually do everything it says every day after a few days everything with start looking really great and pulled together! For instance, spending one minute cleaning up dust bunnies and crumbs with a hand-held vacuum. I bet if I did this every day for a week my living room would be a lot cleaner! And you could bet I would be timing it down to the second!

Speaking of hand-held vacuums, maybe if my boyfriend is reading this he will get me one of these new hand-held vacuums that look likes a lava lamp! I really want one cause I hate lugging out the huge vacuum for a small job.

Cleaning after Pets

Might I suggest some tips for cleaning up after pets? There is a wealth of information out there on cleaning after them.

If you have any caged animals (really no animals should technically be caged because they should be let out all the time, but that is another story), find ways to clean up after them every single day! Perhaps every morning you can change the newspaper in the cage. As a matter of fact, it is better to not use newspaper at all. Use paper that has no ink on it or brown garbage bags. The ink from newspapers is probably not good for pets. May I suggest you invest in a quality cage, that takes into account the best accomodations for the particular animal. No animal should have to walk around on wire all day long. Invest in cage liners, for example for ferrets they have cage mats for every level, even ramps of the cage!

Make sure you also give fresh water each and every single day. Would you like water that your poured for yourself yesterday? How about the coffee from yesterday morning? When you are giving fresh food, wash and dry the bowl completely and give the pet new food. Would you like more cereal on top of the cereal you didn't eat yesterday? Neither would your bird or hamster.

Also, you can invest in cage aprons for birds so you don't have to be constantly vacuuming after their dust and seed. Make sure you change the newspaper for pets like this once a week. You can set the timer on your cell phone to go off so you remember, if you are like me and have trouble remembering or getting it done instead of putting it off!

If you have any other tips for cleaning up after pets, please leave a comment so my readers can benefit. Thanks!

Cleaning your Closet

I am going to be cleaning out a huge closet we have under the stairs. I have slated this weekend to get the closet into shape. We have some shelves in it, but its also a very deep closet. There is lots of stuff piled into this closet, so much that if you want to get into one of the Rubbermaid containers in the back, you literally have to climb over the vacuum and some boxes to get to it. We have a lot of Rubber-Maid and Legal Boxes in the coset, as well as the vacuum, brooms, mops and some boxes left over from when we bought printers and gadgets and stuff.

This is my plan of action:

1. Take everything out of closet
2. Have piles of stuff, depending on whether it should go back in the closet, to another place in the house, or to the garbage. If you are not sure have a seperate pile to go over again at the end.
3. Clean out closet by vacuuming, dusting, etc.
4. Decide if you need some kind of organization tools such as more RubberMaid containers, a closet organizer system, or shelving.
5. Install anything from Step 4.
6. Put everything in its decided place- back in the closet, to another closet (this is a funny one), or to the garbage.



Also it may help to be really straight forward with yourself about whether you really need something. Do you really need 5 pairs of scissors? If so, would you be better suited putting them where you might need them? One in the bathroom, one near the laundry, one in the box of gift-wrap, etc. But don't do what I do and stop cleaning the closet in order to put together a gift wrapping kit- you will never finish anything that way!