It’s finally come to this…your home has become so out-of-control, so chaotic that you’ve turned to the Internet to learn how to clean house. Risky, but if you’ve made it here you’re heading in the right direction. Here at How to Clean Things our philosophy is that house cleaning should be easy, low-maintenance, and non-toxic. Sounds simple enough, but following through on this will show you how different this strategy is compared to the just-spray-this-on-it, take-some-speed-and-clean-all-day method pushed by our commercial culture. We are constantly urged to bring more things into our homes, and when things get dirty, we use untested chemicals to get the job done. Yikes. (That’s right…yikes.) Read my latest article on how to clean a house, lest you end up like Mrs. Cuddles Bear.
When I was nearing completion on my research for the article How to Clean Laminate, I sent an email to one of my very close friends (who I know to have laminate floors) to ask her if she had any laminate floor cleaning tips. What she told me was rather astonishing. While she did confirm for me that it’s not necessary to clean laminate flooring very often, she also confirmed my suspicions that it’s pretty common for people to not know how to clean laminate flooring correctly. Almost everything she told me she was doing to clean laminate wood floors was in direct opposition to my own research… research that included care instructions from several manufacturers of laminate flooring. Needless to say, the moment I get this blog post finished, I’ll be sending her a link to this article. I’m just hoping she hasn’t already done irreparable damage to her wood laminate flooring. And while I’m at it, may I suggest that you, too, read my article on cleaning laminate flooring.
While it seems like you should be able to clean stone with whatever the hell you want in whatever manner you want (I mean, it’s stone right?), that just simply isn’t the case. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that the old codgers you’ve talked to about this have probably told you to just use some good ol’ TSP, muriatic acid or bleach. Yeah. Right. Next time you’re over at their house take a good look at their stone floors and see what kind of shape they’re in. I’d bet my left jelly bean that they’re etched, cloudy looking and the grout is crumbling. When it comes to cleaning stone, my advice to you is to listen to what the old folks have to say, tell them you’ll take their advice, promptly disregard their advice, read my article on how to wash stone, and learn about cleaning natural stone with proper stone cleaners that won’t damage your investment.
With as common and ancient a building material as brick is, you would think that the specifics to cleaning brick would be stacked near the front of every homeowners mind. This, however, is simply not the case. The knowledge of how to clean bricks seems to be slowly fading away with the passing of each year. OK, maybe I’m being a bit over dramatic, but I do believe that many of us don’t take care of things as well as our forefathers did. Luckily, since I know a good many people are going to read this article on washing brick, there are still enough of us out there who care enough to not let things go to pot. But there I go being over dramatic again. Before I embarrass myself further, allow me to stop ranting and direct you to my latest article, How to Clean Brick.
Published by Amber on January 1, 2010
in cars.
Once upon a time, when I was about 16, my stepmom paid me $20 to clean and wash her car. Because she actually hated doing it herself that much. Me? I kind of like cleaning cars, although you’d never be able to tell by looking at my Saturn. But that’s what makes it so satisfying: once every year or two, I thoroughly clean something that thoroughly needed cleaning. And that just feels good. What doesn’t feel good is learning that cleaning and washing a car is, almost by definition, an environmentalist’s nightmare. All that water; all those chemicals; all those poor aquatic creatures living near where the storm drains empty into the river. So this year, when it came time to give the car a bath, I did some research and learned how to clean a car using only nontoxic everyday household products. And to save water, I resisted getting entranced by the ripples in the water flowing over the hood. Turns out, cleaning a car the environmentally friendly way can also mean cleaning it the inexpensive, efficient way.
