A Clean Home |

Eliminate harsh chemicals, and use one cleaner for many purposes!

If there is one thing I know well, it’s house cleaning. I grew up with an obsessive house cleaning mother who not only sanitized our home, she had a side job cleaning others as well.

This is a brief lesson in how to keep your home spic-and-span throughout the week so you never have to spend a whole day on your weekends scrubbing away.

1. All you really need:

mop
bucket
broom/ dust pan
old t-shirts or rags (my mother was a huge fan of cloth baby diapers)
vacuum
2 empty spray bottles
Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day All Purpose Cleaner
Vinegar
Lemon Juice
Newspaper
Pet Hair Sponge (if you have a little furry beast around)

2. Mix your own cleaners and save a ton of money!

In one spray bottle, mix 1/8 cup of the Mrs. Meyers All Purpose Cleaner with water. Use this for countertops, cupboard doors, etc. Really anything but glass!
In the other spray bottle, mix 2 tablespoons of white vinegar with 1/4 cup lemon juice, and fill up with water. This is the BEST window and glass cleaner! Spray it on and wipe down with newspaper to shine up your glass.

3. Break up your home into 4 areas (or as many or few nights that you want to clean)

The office plus the living room is one of our cleaning "areas". It works best to do rooms that are close together, connected, or alike (i.e. all bathrooms).

4. Clean one area a night, only mopping the floors every other week.

5. The best order for cleaning an area:

Pick up and put away anything that isn’t supposed to be out
If you have pets, use your pet hair sponge to pick up any hair on upholstered surfaces.
Using the Mrs. Meyer’s spray you mixed, clean surfaces and quickly wipe down everything in the area. You don’t always have to spray directly onto a surface. You can spray onto a rag and use it as you would a dusting cloth.
Using your premixed glass spray, spritz any glass in the area and wipe down with newspaper.
Put any chairs up on tables to clear the floors for you to sweep and vacuum.
Vacuum any area rugs, and then roll them up.
Sweep the floors
Every other week, mop the floors with the same Mrs. Meyer’s All Purpose Cleaner. I use 1/4 cup in a bucket of hot water.
When the floors are dry, quickly unroll the rugs, put chairs back, etc.

If you keep up with this schedule every week, and you have a moderately sized home, this really shouldn’t take very long! The better you are at keeping up with it, the faster it becomes. Jeff and I clean for about 30 minutes at night and rarely have to spend full days cleaning the place. We love having the weekends off for relaxing and cooking!