Keeping the house clean in Ottawa is hard work. Among all of life’s competing priorities, when it comes to deep Cleaning the spaces of our home, we’ve got limited time and energy to devote to cleaning. It’s only natural to make a cleaning routine that prioritizes the biggest problems first, but all too often this causes us to neglect the little things. Enviropure is a master of the ‘little things’ that separate a good cleaning job from an exceptional one, so consider our list of Ottawa’s most frequently-missed house-cleaning tasks next time you deep-clean the house!
1. Getting Behind Appliances
We get it. Nobody wants to pull out the appliances to see the mess that lies beneath. Better instead to believe that the darkness under the fridge, oven, and dishwasher is a place things disappear, never to be seen again.
That is, until something starts to smell, or attract pests.
We neglect the mess under our appliances because it is typically a tough cleaning job, but it’s a tough cleaning job only because it is so frequently neglected. Next time you’re sweeping or mopping the kitchen, take a few seconds to quickly pull out your appliances and give a quick clean there as well. While this is not likely to totally clean the mess under there, the simple practice of doing this regularly will eventually clean it and guarantee that it stays clean, never to be a problem again!
2. Wiping Down Baseboards
Baseboards are beautiful aesthetic additions to our home, but can be a major hassle to properly clean. Oddly shaped, it’s not as easy as using the mop or broom to wipe/brush them down when taking care of the floors. Often we have to get down on hands and knees, scrubbing away the afternoon to take care of the junk that has accumulated on them over weeks of neglect.
A popular comment among Enviropure clients after their first clean is how clean the baseboards are! You know when your couch or table is Dirty because they are features of a room. Baseboards are accents, contribute to the impression of a space, but rarely do we really recognize their presence. When they get dirty, our impression of a space is impacted without really knowing why. When they are cleaned, suddenly a whole room brightens up.
3. Cleaning Behind the Toilet
When a toilet gets even a little dirty, it’s easy to tell. When dirty, they broadcast the presence of any kind of dirt, Dust, stains, etc. When clean, they give an impression of a clinically sanitary space.
Too often we are too reliant on our impressions of the cleanliness of a space, and lose sight of the reality. Cleaning visible porcelain surfaces makes a space feel clean, but cleaning the not-so-visible porcelain surfaces makes a space legitimately clean. Cleaning the top, seat, and bowl of your toilet will generate the immediate impression that it is clean, but shifting your perspective to the back of the toilet might reveal something different!
We clean spaces we see on a regular basis, because when they are dirty the impact our peace of mind. Taking the opportunity to clean the spaces we don’t see regularly as well will not only make the space more peaceful, but allow it to stay that way for longer. With no sources of dust and detritus to spread around the room, you protect your sanity by reducing the future requirement to clean up!
4. Wiping Cabinets, Inside and Out
We clean ‘with our eyes’, but dirt and grime has no such limitations. Spraying down the doors of your cabinets is a great way to improve the clean feel of a room by taking care of what you can immediately see, but if opening them reveals a different reality, it might be time to clean their interiors as well.
Cleaning cabinets is a hassle, there’s no way around it. You’ve got to pull everything out, remove all the junk, spray things down, and then put everything back in. Repeating this process for every cabinet can be frustrating, but is a simple reality when it comes to deep-cleaning the home.
When you set out to accomplish this job, take the opportunity to sort through the contents of your cabinet as you pull them out. Put back what has value after cleaning, and recycle everything else. Not only will increase the clean feel of you cabinet interiors, but less clutter will maintain that feel for significantly longer.
5. Sweeping Closet Interiors
When we throw our boots and shoes in the closet, rarely do we think about the dirt, dust, mud, and snow we’re throwing in there with them. Generally, only open for a few seconds as we grab or put away jackets/shoes, we aren’t very exposed to the junk accumulating on the floor of our closet. It’s easier to close the closet door than it is to empty and clean out our closets, and so closets become a very neglected space.
Cleaning out the closet is not only a great opportunity to sort through old and unwanted shoes, boots, jackets, etc; but will substantially reduce the requirement to tidy surrounding areas. Closets are highly trafficked, meaning that junk accumulated in your closet will spread simply by frequent activity. Cleaning these areas out will mean less mess spread to other areas, and less time spent cleaning!
6. Dusting Ceiling Fans
Ceiling fans don’t only accumulate massive amounts of dust, but they are the perfect vehicle for spreading it as well. While they spin, they are simultaneously spreading and accumulating dust.
Fans kick up dust and cause it to fly around a space, creating airflow that can dislodge dust and carry it significant distances. A fan on in foyer can influence the motion of dust in the living room, and eventually this dust can follow air currents all the way to the fan itself, adhering to its surface. As it spins, dust particles that have shifted can lose their grip on the blade, sometimes in chunks! They dislodge, enter air currents, and spread all throughout a home.
The dust on ceiling fans can be tough to see, especially in lofty spaces. Cleaning it off can be a hassle, but will contribute to reducing the overall dust in your home and improving indoor air quality. So long as the dust you regularly clean off them ends up outside the house, you can consider them giant air filters
7. Cleaning Blinds
Blinds, especially horizontal blinds, can be frustrating to clean without the right tools. Taking a feather duster or a cloth to each individual blind is a recipe for not just an exhausting experience, but an inefficient one as well!
All it takes to properly and quickly clean blinds is access to the right duster! With the correct tool, you can reduce the time performing this job massively, and accomplish a clean that is far better! Just make sure your implement is thin enough to easily fit between the slats in your blind, and high-quality enough to guarantee the easy sticking of any dust particles.
8. Taking Care of Vents
Ottawa homeowners, we find, generally consider ‘vent cleaning’ a part of their regular sweeping. This is unwise because not only does a broom do a poor job of cleaning out vents, but not all vents are on the floor!
Dirty vents aren’t so easy to see, so often we don’t include them as part of our regular cleaning routines. The impact they have on the cleanliness of a space is more felt than seen. A major influence on indoor air quality, dirty vents can make even the cleanest spaces feel dirty with musty, dry, scratchy air.
9. Checking Ceilings!
Look up!
Do you see something on the ceiling that could use a cleaning?
Ottawa homeowners nearly always neglect to clean their ceilings, so we’re willing to bet that quickly inspecting them will reveal the presence of something in need of a scrub!
Maybe it was a milkshake explosion months back, maybe last week’s spaghetti-sauce gone wrong. Maybe its mold! Whatever it is, you don’t want to leave it dirty, but the task of getting it clean is a head scratcher. Are you supposed to use a ladder to clean your home?!
When it comes to cleaning ceilings, all it takes is a sponge on a stick! These and other related products can typically be found at your grocery store, or wherever cleaning products are sold. Sometimes sold as bathtub scrubbers, having one of these at your disposal will make awkward jobs like this easier than ever before.
Enviropure Home Cleaning
When it comes to getting the best clean possible, the devil is in the details. Taking the time and energy required to emphasize the deep in deep cleaning, while also balancing the need to retain peace of mind, can be a tightrope act. If you’d like to get off the rope entirely, and skip right to the peace-of-mind a clean home provides without the repeated investment of time and energy getting it clean, consider getting in touch with Enviropure!
The post Ottawa’s 9 Most Neglected Home Cleaning Tasks appeared first on Enviropure Home.
