Woah nelly! Stop right there, partner! If you’re looking for a traditional “textbook how to” on house cleaning this is most definitely not the place for you. However, if you are looking around at the pit you live in and questioning your life choices and are looking for a way to reconcile the unorganized labyrinth that is your home, then I am your man!
I will be starting my little journey by taking on the little challenges that are heaped around my house and writing about them. You are welcome to read along, laugh at my pain, and maybe learn a little something along the way.
Let’s start in one of my most favorite places to make a mess, the kitchen! It’s impossible to keep clean! Here goes nothing.
Now the easiest way to keep the kitchen clean is to just not use it. I would suggest ordering out every night and confining the mess to your dim-lit bedroom where you have small mountain of pizza boxes, a collection of unused chopsticks and unopened fortune cookies on the coffee table while you lay back on your chaise lounge and finger the lint out of your belly button while the office plays in the background for the 328th time this month. Anyways, enough about my weekend.
If you are in fact a normal adult, or at least are trying to be a normal adult, a clean and organized kitchen go a long way for those cheap and healthy home-cooked meals that I should be eating instead of a large Papa John’s meat lovers pizza with extra sauce and a melts in your mouth 6 cheese blend, MMMMmmmm.
Now if you’re the kitchen is anything like mine, you’ll need to start from scratch. The first thing I’m going to do is just take EVERYTHING out of the cabinets and drawers and put it all in one safe and clean location in an organized chaos kind of fashion, out of the kitchen and out of the way. I would suggest leaving everything in the fridge for the moment unless you’re ready to begin. Given that there are perishables that need to be cooled.
Take a preemptive strike and load up the dishwasher with all the dirty dishes you can and start it up, by the time you’re done cleaning the kitchen they’ll be just about ready to put away into their freshly cleaned homes.
Once your kitchen is bare and you can see the outlines of dust and dirt from where your appliances and kitchenware once were, you are ready, it’s time to gear up.
HOUSE CLEANING SUPPLIES
Before you start it would be wise to have these things at the ready to make it easiest on you during your escapade in the kitchen.
1. About two hours of free time
2. Clean sponges
3. A scouring pad (Scotch-Brite or other)
4. Steel wool (in case of really touching grime)
5. Spray bottle of a cleaner of your choice
6. Clean rags or paper towels
7. A clean sink full of hot soapy water
8. An empty sink for rinsing
9. A Clean spot (preferably with a towel underneath for drying
10. Broom and dustpan
11. Mop or bucket full of hot water and floor cleaner
12. Your favorite hype music and a loudspeaker
HOUSE CLEANING SUPPLIES
Now for the kitchen, I prefer to use non-harsh chemical cleaners for obvious reasons. My new favorite cleaner is a product called “WHIP IT”. It’s an all-natural formula with no harsh house cleaning chemicals, and the best part is it smells like lemons! You can use it for literally all your house cleaning needs in the kitchen and even the floor included.
If you’re not willing to spend this kind of money you could always make a DIY compound using an empty spray bottle one of the many DIY house cleaning solutions you can find from a simple internet search. For those who don’t know DIY, means Do It Yourself, might seem pointless to throw this in here but there are a lot of dummies out there, I would know to be one of them.
Look out below! It’s the top Google search result for those of you too lazy to search it yourself!
Anywho, maybe you don’t care about any of that and are ready to bug bomb your kitchen with whatever poison that was haphazardly thrown under your kitchen sink. Grab your paper towels, rags or torn up t-shirts and let’s get to work.
Sanitize a spot on the counter to put all the contents of your fridge and freezer. Starting with the freezer pull out all your hot pockets, frozen pizzas, and jimmy dean breakfast sandwiches and get ready to work. First, I would advise tossing anything gross or expired so that way you don’t trick yourself into putting something gross back into your refrigerator.
Pull out all the shelves and put them in the sink full of hot soapy water for now. Have a towel for drying hands as well. Get to work and really scrub out all the filth and strips of cardboard from the boxes that you’ve let collect in there over time. Once you’re satisfied that your freezer is clean move on to the shelves in the sink and scrub them clean. Rinse and dry off the shelves and put them back where they belong along with all of the food products you took out of the freezer.
Repeat the process for your fridge and DO NOT be afraid to toss things out. If you’re anything like me you’ll look at that half-eaten jar of green olives that have been there for months and say “oh I forgot I had those, I’ll finish them later.” Chances are you will not finish them later and it will be another month or two before you actually decide to throw it away. GET RID OF THE CLUTTER NOW!
Now just to be clear, I certainly don’t condone needless waste, but unless you’re Monica from F.R.I.E.N.D.S chances are you’ve got at least a little bit. I’m more like Joey and Chandler, with a whole shelf of expired products. Don’t be afraid to throw things away if you know you’re probably never going to use them, or if it’s possible, put them aside and donate them to a shelter near you. Which also reminds me, stay tuned for future posts so I can teach you heathens how to properly dispose of any waste/recycling that you might have.
Now that the fridge is clean and everything is put back neatly, let’s move on. Start by pulling out your appliances so that you can clean behind them, DO NOT start there though!
Start at the top and of the cabinets and work your way down. Pay extra attention to the little spots that can be easy to overlook:
Hinges
· Corners
· behind the shelves, if they come out
· the top of the fridge
· the top of the cabinet doors
· the lips on the cabinet doors
· the slide rails on the drawers
· The sides of the drawers
· the lip under the countertops
· the pipes under the sink
Scrub to your heart's content, don’t forget the walls and sides of the appliances that you’ve pulled out. Assuming you started from the top of the kitchen like any sane person would, all of the debris and dirt has fallen to the floor. Take your broom and dustpan and really make sure you’ve got it all off the floor before hitting it with the mop or getting on your hands and knees to scrub the floor clean.
TIP: If you have an electric stove, wrap your drip pans in tin foil, it makes it easy to just throw out and replace the tin foil instead of having to buy new ones every time they accumulate too much crap!
Now that your kitchen is sparkling, or maybe it still is a disaster because you suck at cleaning, whatever you tried. You can start to organize and put everything away again. Designate drawers and cabinets for your kitchenware ahead of time and use trays and other organization tools to help keep things tidy for future use.
Here’s a place to start to get some ideas. If you’re feeling too lazy stay tuned for my upcoming articles on the organization in the kitchen!
I know that this all seems obvious but hey, you’re the one who couldn’t figure it out yourself and had to look on the internet for it. Besides, this is literally how the pros do it!
Of course, if you are looking at your kitchen and feeling entirely overwhelmed and you got a little extra money, you can let all your pre- House cleaning anxiety disappear with a simple phone call or email to any of your local house cleaning services. They’ll probably do a better job than you can anyways! I hope you enjoyed this post and I welcome you back next time!
