For me, cleaning the house is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration; it’s all about the mental rather than the physical oomph. My mind usually being on Higher Things (such as the perplexing question “Would you accept a million dollars if it meant that once every week for the rest of your life at a random time you would throw up with only thirty seconds’ warning?”), it is unlikely ever to occur to me that the doorframes need wiping down or the valance needs waxing, or… you know… whatever it is housewives do.
But just last week I lit upon a stratagem so brilliant I’m considering approaching the publishers of The Secret and marketing it as a sequel. What you do is take a microfiber cloth, the kind that works wet or dry and can wipe up an entire powdered elephant without flinching. You clean something with it until it is good and smeggy, then toss it in the machine. When you next do a load of laundry and are hanging up the wet clothes, you come across the now-pristine and usefully damp microfiber cloth and think “Aha!” So instead of hanging it up to dry, you wander round the house with it until you find a surface that needs cleaning and clean it, pausing not nor blenching until the cloth is once more in a state of disarray. Then you simply toss it back into the enpty washing machine, where it awaits the next load.
The good thing about this is that microfiber cloths can be used on a whole range of surfaces that are easy to forget about cleaning, such as mirrors and windows and windowsills and… well, in my house, everything really. The first time I did this I got all excited and wiped off half the house, starting with cleanish surfaces and moving to more atrocious ones. I’ve been doing it for three weeks now, and my ceilings have never been less fly-specked.
Try it. It’ll make your house a good 3% cleaner, I guarantee… and when your husband comes home from work and says “What did you do today?” you can beam at him with the smugness of a Stepford wife and say “I wiped the skirting board in the bathroom“. And he’ll be like “Uh, k” and then cautiously congratulate you, eyes flicking round nervously as if he is afraid you will go for his neck. And that is a Good Thing.
Kovac Says:
