Welcome to Clean Freak Confessions, a celebration for sharing personal cleaning experiences and tips from leading bloggers. Join the conversation and share your thoughts with us!
Tips From My Clean Freak Friend
We established in my last post that I am not actually much of a clean freak. I want to be, and I wish I were, but I’m still working on it. Why would I want to be a clean freak? Essentially, I’m going for that feeling that I get when I walk into my mom’s house, or - more recently - when I walk into my friend, Amy’s, house. It’s a feeling of complete calm and order, and after being surrounded by the chaos that is often in my home, it is completely intoxicating.
I’m hoping Amy will let me be her apprentice in cleanliness, that perhaps she’ll let me learn at her feet the ways of keeping a house (literally) spotless with three young kids at home. I checked in with Amy to see if she had any basic tips she could pass on to me, and here’s what she had to offer. What I notice more than anything is the attitude that she’s developing in her kids that pitching in on cleaning is an expected part of being a family. It’s not about punishing or rewarding, but rather just what you do when you are part of a team. Each person pitches in, habits are reinforced, and everyone reaps the benefits.
Amy’s Clean Freak Tips
- Find double-duty or lower cost uses for cleaning products. Amy mentioned that she uses large anti-bacterial wipes on her floor mop instead of the pricer ones that are sold to go with it.
- Streamline laundry. Amy washes all the family clothes together on warm, and does a morning and evening load daily. Everyone throws their clothes in the washer, and everyone is responsible for putting away folded clothes when the laundry is done. Aside from eliminating that morning scramble to find a matching pair of socks for a child to wear to school that day (not that I would know anything about that ….) it also reduces the chances of stains setting in.
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My confession today is that I was the kid who wanted to vacuum not just well but perfectly. It was important to me that I do a good job vacuuming because what if the President just happened to stop by our house? Certainly, he would see my superior vacuum job, determine that no one had ever undertaken this task with such precision, and then enlist me in the fight against Communism. Admittedly, every thought I had as a kid revolved around the looming threat of nuclear war with Russia, and my way of dealing with such an overwhelming sense of hopelessness was to assign ridiculous value to things like vacuuming in perfectly symmetrical rows. If I vacuumed well, then Gorbachev would lose.
When it was time for chores, my mother would always ask me to vacuum because my brother and sister didn’t take nearly as much pride in this skill as I did. I would plan out each room so that the carpet would look as close to new as possible. I loved the way the carpet pile would alternate between dark and light. I’d try to make the best, most uniform strokes to ensure that the darks and lights were perfect. Years later my therapist would diagnose this as OCD. I just called it Fighting Communism.
Back in law school I occasionally attended a class on economic theory where the professor talked a lot about “opportunity costs.” I had to have my roommate (a former Econ major), explain opportunity costs to me, because I’m Dutch and genetically incapable of understanding such things. “Basically,” he said, “It means if you make $75 an hour at a law firm, it’s smarter to work a few extra hours a week and pay an undocumented worker $6 an hour to mow your lawn.”
“PAY somebody to mow your lawn?” I laughed. Who ever heard of such a thing? Never mind that I kept myself flush with Nintendo cartridges all through Junior High by mowing other peoples’ lawns, I couldn’t imagine PAYING someone to mow my lawn when I am perfectly suited to do it myself.
And that’s still exactly how I am about cleaning my house. I simply could not bring myself to hire someone to come clean my house. It’s not that I look down on people who do hire house cleaners: in an academic context it makes perfect sense. The opportunity cost of cleaning is tremendous. It’s time you could be spending with your kids, or working on moneymaking endeavors that pay more, or just relaxing. Also, people who hire cleaners are helping to create jobs and stimulate the economy. Thank goodness there are people who hire other people to clean their houses.
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I grew up in the disposable eighties and started taking care of my own home in the mid-nineties, and have never had any trouble buying up specialty cleansers for every purpose: from cleaning windows to cutting stovetop grease, to inhibiting mildew in showers to getting rid of hard water around your faucets. And don’t even get me started on the disinfectant wipes.
In the past three or four years, though, I’ve discovered the joys of this.
I feel a little behind the time, as people have used distilled white vinegar as an all-purpose cleaner for generations. And now I know why:
* Its uses are endless. I find new ways to use it all the time.
* It costs virtually nothing.
* It doesn’t leave your house with a perfumey “cleanser scent.”
Besides the obvious—dyeing Easter eggs—here are the many ways I’ve used vinegar in my house over the past month:
I’m pretty sure that when I had my first daughter, I had absolutely no idea that toys would take over my entire existence.
Then we added two more kids to the mix.
Considering we spent a pretty penny on our family room decor, there was no way we were going to let ourselves drown in a sea of play good, dump trucks, and princess dress up clothes. But when you don’t have an actual playroom, or kids that are old enough for you to just send them off to a designated play area for a good couple of years, you’re inevitably stuck with having toys in places you never thought you’d ever have toys before.
And thus entered my love affair with bins.
Thankfully, bins are no longer these gigantic plastic tubs that scream ‘toys’ louder than the actual toys themselves. As of late, you can find a plethora of amazing storage bins that won’t force you to compromise your design sensibility. In fact, some of them are so fantastic that they actually look like a decor choice as opposed to a storage system. And best of all, since they’re easy to move around and fill up, they’re perfect for ensuring that you’re not the only one cleaning up at the end of the day.
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