Thanks for joining me. In today's episode, I'm going to
talk you through cleaning your kitchen and bathrooms to get
your house sanitary. And then for those of you who
are financial supporters, there will be a Part 2 where we
continue this session by picking up your outer areas, dusting,
and lastly cleaning up a bedroom.
Let's get right into the episode.
The first thing you're going to want to do is gear up for your
cleaning session. There are a few things you might
need to do to kind of kick things off.
Maybe you need to freshen up for the day.
Maybe you're not feeling presentable yet.
Trust me, that's going to drag you down.
So maybe you need to freshen up a little bit and change into
something comfortable yet presentable.
Maybe you need to run a brush through your hair, wash your
face, put on some moisturizer, whatever makes you feel ready
for the day. Now is the time to do that if
you have not already done so. Another way to kick off the
cleaning session if you're already ready for the day, is to
start a load of laundry. Maybe you need to strip your bed
and wash your bedding, or maybe you need to do a survival load
of towels and underwear, or just a load of clothing darks light.
It's time to start some laundry if it is needed.
Another way you can kick off your cleaning session is get
your house smelling fresh. Usually the most important step
is taking out the trash and relining it.
We just got back from a little mini weekend vacation.
We were visiting my daughter Jessica and her family and when
we got back it was like, oh we got to take out the trash.
Like my husband was cleaning while I was working from home
and the one thing that he forgot to do was take out the trash.
So that was the first thing we did when we walked in to freshen
up our clean looking but not so clean smelling house.
So maybe you do need to take out your trash and reline it.
You might also need to run your garbage disposal, light a
candle, start a wax warmer, whatever makes your house smell
good. If it's a nice day outside,
we're having nice weather today, you could open up some windows
and let some air flow through the house.
When I do that, I just open key windows.
I don't like to open every window in my house because I'm
worried that I'll forget to close them and then, you know,
the house won't be secure. So typically I will open the
front window in my living room and I'll raise the blinds to
remind me that those windows are open, because normally I would
just turn the blinds to let light in.
But if I have the actual window open, I'll raise it.
And I I said windows plural, because I might do the same with
one of the two windows that's on the side of my living room.
Then I will open a window in my bedroom because that's the
opposite end of the house. And of course I'll have that
curtain wide open to remind me that that window is open.
But I realize the weather might not be ideal where you are.
Still, opening curtains and blinds to allow some light to
come in will energize you and reveal any dust for when we get
to the dusting portion. And really, it just lifts your
spirits. Whenever you look at a new house
that's been properly staged for the real estate market, they
make sure that lots of natural light is allowed to come in it.
It just gives a nicer impression and every little bit helps when
you're trying to muster up the motivation to clean.
But remember, you've got to take action whether you feel
motivated or not. The motivation comes with the
action. So by now you have probably done
whatever you needed to do to gear up for your cleaning
session. We're going to spend several
minutes in the kitchen and before we do that, I need you to
gather up any dirty dishes or cups from around the house.
For example, I'm in my office and I have this coffee mug with
a spoon in it. For those of you who are
watching the video, this needs to go to the kitchen after this
and I'm not getting ready to clean after this, but I try when
I go to the kitchen to take something with me so that I'm
not accumulating things. So remember to work on the habit
just throughout your day of not leaving a room empty handed.
I'm going to grab that when I leave this room and I'm going to
look around and see what else I can grab and relocate at the
same time be gathering up any dishes, cups, silverware,
whatever is around your house and get that to the kitchen.
And by kitchen, just to kind of define the kitchen as a
household zone, I typically mean your kitchen, your kitchen table
if it has a nook or an if it's an eat in kitchen, whatever you
call that. But I'm also including your
formal dining room, even if it's in another location because it
just makes sense when you're clearing and wiping down kitchen
surfaces that you deal with both of your tables.
If you have two eating areas at my house, I just have a large
eat in kitchen. Sometimes I call that part of
the kitchen the dining room. But since it's on tile, it's
definitely part of my kitchen. At one house.
I did have a formal dining room when you first enter the house
that was over carpet initially. By now you've at 1st until we
switch to flooring later on. By now you've gathered up any
dishes. The next step is to get any
difficult items soaking, you know, pre rinsed and soaking
that pot and pan or that container in the refrigerator
where you scraped out some old leftovers or you need to scrape
out some old leftovers. Let's get those heavily soiled
items pre rinsed and soaking first, and then let's also
consolidate the dishes to the sink area.
If there are dirty dishes on different parts of your
countertop, let's move those either into the sink or right
next to the sink. That way you can start tidying
up your kitchen. As far as the other stuff, it's
not dishes. You want to consolidate the
dishes, do the sink area, get the difficult items soaking, and
then it's going to be time to remove visual clutter and kind
of pre clean your countertops and table tops so that you can
spray and wipe them. OK, along with the appliances
and cabinets, everything that's going to be wiped.
I mentioned that I visited Jessica this weekend.
She is definitely a minimalist, not when it comes to clothing,
but her kitchen and living. Her kitchen and living room are
very visually appealing. She doesn't have anything
cluttery out and she has, you know, pretty throw blankets and
throw pillows that kind of tie everything together and her her
kitchens just not cluttered at all.
And when you open her cabinets, it's easy to find things because
she doesn't just have tons of gadgets and cups and different
parts and things like that. And it definitely motivated me
to go through my cabinets and get rid of some things, but also
take some things out of circulation.
In this episode, I'm going to be talking a little bit about
decluttering as you clean and just decluttering in general.
If you've been listening to the show for long, you know that
I've talked a lot about taking dishes and things out of
circulation, meaning things that you're not going to get rid of
because you're going to need them at some point.
But you don't want people dirtying those items every day
or having to move those items around to find the things that
are used more often. You want to put some things away
into more of a long term storage area.
I definitely got motivated to declutter my kitchen in the near
future while working in hers because everything was just so
streamlined and I tend to accumulate gadgets.
But I do have some gadgets that are missing parts and I'm not
going to order replacement parts for them because it's, you know,
the most expensive part is missing on the item I'm thinking
of. So I do have some things that I
need to just give up on and toss as far as parts of gadgets I no
longer have the motor for whatever that definitely needs
to happen. And then also I need to take
some glasses and plates out of circulation.
Just putting them up in high out of reach cupboard so they're out
of sight, out of mind and not getting dirtied up on a regular
basis. Because if there's let me put it
to you this way, and by now, hopefully you're decluttering
your surfaces, you've you've consolidated the mess to the
dishes. Your difficult items are soaking
at this point. Hopefully you're clearing off
your countertops, you're picking up any items off the floor that
don't belong. You're clearing off your table
and chairs so that you can just go spray happy with whatever
product you like to use a a multi surface product that's
good on wood countertops blast. There's one of the pledges
that's for that. But there are other multi
surface sprays that would be appropriate.
Those are always nice or just something kind of mild, you
know, like a Myers spray or something would be good.
Whatever you have on hand. But keep in mind, if you don't
have the perfect, perfect spray, you can just use a clean damp
cloth with some dish soap and hot water on it and just, you
know, go to town wiping things down without spraying.
Or alternatively, you might be using two different products.
You might be using a glass cleaner, maybe on your stainless
steel appliances and the glass windows of your appliances.
And then you know, just using dish soap in the other areas.
But let's get the pre clean done.
Let's put away any random clutter.
The fewer obstacles you have, the easier it's going to be to
clean your kitchen. And the reason you might be
feeling overwhelmed right now is because of the visual clutter.
It's it's tricking your mind into thinking that it's going to
take you long, a long time to clean your kitchen.
And then, of course, once you're done with your surfaces, then I
want you to go back to your dishes and wash the easy items
first. Maybe that's an empty reload and
run of your dishwasher and then scrubbing those pots and pans.
Or maybe it's washing a sink load of glasses and bowls and
plates and silverware and then moving on to those other items,
changing the water as needed. You know what needs to be done
as far as your dishes. But the point I want to drive
home here is that someone in your family or multiple people
in your family might have a tendency to reach for just a
clean dish or clean plate rather than washing The Dirty stuff
first. It's just easier in their mind
to grab something else. And that person might be you.
Even though you're going to be hiding some dishes away that you
don't need on a daily basis, the fact that you have to check for
another cupboard for them, it's going to remind you that you
don't like dishes to pile up. You don't like having to deal
with that much at once and it would be better to just wash the
dishes that you have in your sink and eat off one of those
than to reach for another 1 and add to the mess.
And I don't know if I completely agree with this next concept,
but I'm just going to throw it out there.
I have heard it said that when you're overwhelmed, you should
live out of your dishwasher. Live out of your clean laundry
basket. Like never go for something else
until you're caught up on these things that aren't fully dealt
with. Just use those few things, you
know, wear something out of your clean laundry basket rather than
pulling something out of the drawer or the closet.
I feel like it it resonates a little more when it comes to
laundry because let's say you have a, a just a heaping laundry
basket with multiple loads stuffed in it of clean laundry.
But then you're getting your outfit out of the drawer or out
of the closet. You're not even putting a dent
in that pile that you don't have time to fold and put away.
Whereas if everyone's kind of living out of that basket, which
I know isn't ideal, then the baskets going to at least go
down. And when you do sit down to fold
laundry, there's not going to be as much.
It might be mainly just mismatched socks in the bottom
of the basket. Well, in the same way, if you're
using the clean dishes that are in your dishwasher or that are
in your drying rack, that could prevent you from creating a
bigger mess because you're basically accidentally putting
away your clean dishes by using them.
OK, if you've for those of you with, I guess it applies to a
dishwasher or a drying rack. A lot of my examples involve a
dishwasher, so just insert drying rack there in your mind.
If you're a strictly hand washer, some of you know exactly
what I'm talking about where you just never really empty your
dishwasher. You're, you're going through a
phase where you, when you do think about emptying the
dishwasher, there are only like one or two items in there
because people have been just pulling stuff out and using it.
OK, well they might not do that if you have too many dishes in
circulation. You might have a dishwasher full
of clean dishes. Nobody takes anything out of
there. They pull out of the cabinet and
then you've got a big pile of dirty dishes to wash.
You got to empty your dishwasher 1st.
And that might may be your situation right now, but I'm
always trying to provide tips for making your cleaning
sessions faster and easier in the future.
The goal is always to clean as you go more and be more
efficient in managing your home and to crawl out of the rut
you're in if you're in a rut, and not make the situation
worse. So maybe a solution for you
right now, and this isn't going to apply to everybody or
resonate with everybody, is to live out of your laundry basket
and live out of your dishwasher or drying rat.
So you're using fewer items, but a way to force yourself to do
that is to take some items out of circulation.
OK, For some people, that could be packing away some of their
clothes and, you know, maybe the offseason stuff.
I've mentioned that I don't specifically do that.
And I know we're working in the kitchen, but I'm just thinking
about, you know, laundry basket and dishes.
These are things that kind of pile up on us because let's face
it, cleaning surfaces isn't that difficult unless you've got to
do all these dishes and all this laundry first.
Because I know when I go in to clean my bedroom, that clean
laundry basket is taunting me sometimes.
And I end up dealing with that instead of cleaning my bedroom.
And then, you know, something comes up, I get distracted and,
you know, another day without a clean room.
So just a thought there. It's it's a concept for when
this is not, you know, the ideal or whatever.
Obviously the ideal would be to pull a plate out of the
cupboard. OK.
But this is just an idea for getting out of a rut, OK?
And some of you don't know what I'm talking about when it comes
to taking dishes out of circulation.
I don't expect everyone to have heard every episode.
But you need to do a little bit of math here and decide how many
plates you need or how many bowls you need on a day-to-day
basis. OK, let's say that you don't
necessarily do the dishes after every meal, but you you do them
at least once every 24 hours. OK, you get down to dish 0 or,
or you want to get down to dish 0 every 24 hours.
And you know, people typically, you know, maybe three people in
your home typically use a bowl during the day.
You know, maybe you only need to have three bowls in circulation,
but you own 10 bowls because sometimes you have some
relatives over and you're serving a pot of chili and
you're, you know, dishing it into bowls.
Just an example. Those excess bowls can be stored
out of sight, out of mind, and your family members don't need
to necessarily know where they are.
You can just be like, I put some stuff away because when you go
into the kitchen and there's not a clean bowl, I want you to wash
one. OK, again, it may not resonate
with everybody. You might be the only one who
does dishes in your house. Your kids might be little
toddlers, and maybe you're the only one who prepares food.
I get that. But for a lot of us, you know,
we've got older kids who can fend for themselves.
And when we're gone all day, we don't want to come home to a
dish haster where, you know, they've got their cereal bowls
and then their soup bowls and so on and so on, so forth.
Ice cream bowls. Pretty soon there's just bowls
galore. I don't even own that many
bowls, but I wouldn't want to. OK Bowls aren't something I'm
going to take out of circulation because we don't seem to have
enough bowls. We never seem to have enough.
I think it's because I like these particular bowls that I
got it either Family Dollar or Dollar General and I need to go
find more to replace a few that broke.
So I've been kind of putting off, you know, purchasing bowls
because I I like these certain ones and I want them to match my
existing bowls. But plates, I definitely have
more plates than we need day-to-day, but I like to have
those extra plates because one, we might break some plates at
some point. It's not that common, but it
could happen, right? And two, we might have company
spur the moment sometime where we don't buy disposable plates
because definitely for big holiday meals or you know, get
togethers like, you know, when I had a bunch of my husband's
coworkers over for a BBQ, that type of thing.
I do buy disposable plates, paper plates, so to speak.
It you know, I get the quality ones if I'm having company for
just our families. Sometimes I just get the cheap
ones, you know, just to keep us from dirtying up plates.
But you know how it is sometimes, you know, maybe you
meet up with somebody and it's like, hey, why don't, why don't
you guys come over to our house for dinner?
We're having spaghetti. We've got plenty.
You know, that might be a time where you're going to use more
plates than usual. You know, if you're a family of
five and invite another family of five over, you need 10
plates. Just a thought on not
necessarily getting rid of things, but storing them
somewhere. Alternatively, you could get rid
of them. Maybe you have 30 blades and you
just need to get rid of some. You keep the nice or newer ones
or the ones that match each other.
So that's just something to think about when you're working
in your kitchen. What can you get rid of in your
kitchen today? And it doesn't take a lot of
time. You also might want to start a
donation box. I typically do not donate any
kitchen stuff to charity because I have adult kids and they can
use that stuff. I I give it to my kids.
So for example, when we were at my daughter's house, my husband
was like, yeah, I just gave them that potato peeler that we were
keeping in the RV. Oh, OK, great.
Because she'd been peeling potatoes with a knife and it's
easier with a potato peeler. And you can have the kids do it,
but you could donate them. But if you know young people,
whether they're your siblings, nieces, nephews, adult kids who
are just starting out, whether it's just getting an apartment
or getting married, they might need some of that stuff.
You know, not everybody has this fairy tale wedding with a
registry and stuff. Some people, you know, move out
before that or that never happens for them.
They elope or don't get married at all.
You know, a lot of people just need you to give them stuff.
So maybe start a box for that. And I'm not talking about
forcing things on people that they don't want, but it's like,
you know, hey, do you have a crock pot?
Because I only use this bigger 1 now and you can have my smaller
1. You know, I've given my middle
daughter a couple crock pots. For example, there might be
someone who could really use some of the items in your
kitchen, or maybe you could just start a box for that if you have
the storage space. Some of you are like, I'm in a
tiny house with no storage. I'm not going to have a box
sitting around for the next teenager that grows up and gets
an apartment. I get that.
But some of us have the space for that, and it could be a
thing. You know, you can have a box out
in the garage just labeled kitchen stuff, just like you did
when you were moving, except you're saving it for when
someone needs it. OK, Hopefully you are plugging
away at your dishes, whatever that means for you.
If you're done with the dishes and you've wiped down your large
appliances, your small appliances, your countertop,
stove top, and you know, it might be time to wash your sink,
you know, shine up your sink or maybe it's time for you to sweep
your floor or run a vacuum over your floor.
We are going to talk about cleaning floors in Part 2.
And I might just put this as one full episode for the financial
supporters. So if you listen to this one
before you listen to the bonus episode, you could always Fast
forward through the beginning. Or I mean, if you listen to it
on another day, you could relisten to the beginning and
get your whole house cleaned up once.
But I'm going to have a longer version, let's put it that way,
for the paid subscribers. By the way, special thanks to
those who support the show, either on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, Patreon, or some kind of a private arrangement with
me. I appreciate you more than, you
know, some of you, your husband doesn't want to see little
charges coming out of the account.
Believe me, I get it. There was a phase where we were
really kind of, you know, analyzing our budget and he was
asking me and I, I mainly, you know, handle the finances, but
he was asking, you know, what's this?
What's that? And I cancelled one of my
Patreon subscriptions to an artist that I support who makes
these little stickers and I like to have my little sticker
subscription. I definitely cancelled that for
a while just so my spouse wouldn't question, you know,
this charge on my account or whatever.
And then later, you know, when we kind of got our bearings, I
went ahead and restarted that. So I get that.
But even just listening to these free episodes helps me.
And one way that you can help me without spending a dime is if
you're listening on Spotify to watch the video version.
And I don't necessarily mean watch it, just keep it open.
Don't have it minimized at the bottom of your screen.
If you have it open to where when you look at your phone you
see me sitting here talking into a microphone, that actually
helps me. Another way you can help me,
regardless of the app you listen on is to click on that five star
and give me an excellent rating. By the way, Speaking of the
video version, I read an article that Apple is going to start
having video podcasts on their platform.
So those of you who are listening on Apple, which is
that Purple podcast app, eventually they'll be a video
version. And I don't know, you know, what
the financial implications of that will be, but I'll, I'll let
you know if it's a thing that's going to help me if I you know,
if I want you to necessarily have have the video on or if
that matters. But with Spotify, it does help
me. Hopefully by now you are
cleaning out your sink or possibly cleaning your kitchen
floor. But if you need more time in the
kitchen, you might need to pause the episode and listen to a
couple songs because I'm going to move on to having you clean
your bathrooms. My mom taught me that cleaning
the kitchen and bathrooms is the priority because of that.
What's that's what makes your house sanitary.
Now, obviously it's possible for another room to become
unsanitary, but my mom's not the kind of person that would ever
leave plates or dishes around the house or anything like that.
So, you know, the only thing that might be out in a living
area, you know, is not anything unsanitary.
It could be just someone's shoes and sweater or left in the
living room, or, you know, there's piles of clean laundry.
None of this is unsanitary like what one might find in a kitchen
or bathroom. OK, so let's head to the
bathrooms. And maybe you've got just one
bathroom or maybe you're trying to clean multiple bathrooms at
once. But what I recommend during
these episodes, since I don't give you a ton of time, is to do
a quick straighten of both bathrooms, or all three
bathrooms if you have three, and then pick one bathroom to deep
clean. And that's usually just the one
that you haven't cleaned recently, as recently as the
other one. OK, so maybe if last time you
cleaned, you cleaned your hall bathroom, this time you're going
to focus on the master bathroom. It could also just be a bathroom
of priority. If a guest might stop by, then
that hall bathroom would be your first priority.
If you're just cleaning for yourself, maybe it's your own
bathroom that's a priority if you're, you know, doing it for
yourself or your spouse. If you're doing it for your
spouse, listen to that episode Stop Cleaning for your spouse
because you want to become the type of person who cares whether
your house is clean and you want that that motivation to come
from within and treat it more as a side then benefit when it's
making someone else happy. It's just not a good dynamic.
You know to it. It's just not necessarily a good
dynamic in your marriage to make your spouse feel like you're
doing it just to keep them happy or to keep them from getting
angry. And it's not a good look.
That's why I said cleaning it for yourself.
But obviously, you know, human nature, you might be thinking
I'm going to get more bang for my buck if I clean the bathroom
that he's going to see when he gets home.
But what usually makes some more sense is just you clean the
dirtiest bathroom. So pre cleaning a bathroom
involves picking up anything off of the floor, of course,
clearing off the vanity area, taking out the trash and
relining it and setting aside items that are going to be in
your way. OK, when I clean a bathroom, I'm
using sprays. So obviously I need to move the
toothbrush holder and maybe stick that in the cupboard under
the sink while I'm cleaning. But you could also just, you
know, set it somewhere else outside of the bathroom or, you
know, a different part of the bathroom.
If it's a large bathroom, for example, in my bathroom, there
is a large garden tub that has a lot of space around it.
There's a lead, like a tile ledge around it.
So I'll often set, you know, my toothbrush holder there when I'm
spraying and cleaning the mirror and then, you know, replace it
you once I've cleaned the mirror.
Vanity sinks, just get that bathroom pre cleaned and gather
up in the necessary cleaning supplies if you're not keeping
those in the bathroom. Once you've done that, the next
thing I want you to do is get something into your toilet bowl
and get it soaking. Kind of a good idea is to
sometimes soak your toilet bowl overnight or when you're going
out of town. But when you're just getting
ready to do a cleaning session, you want to get that chemical
into the toilet first. Give it a little swish with that
scrub brush. Then clean the rest of the
bathroom, meeting the sink area, the vanity, the cabinets, you
know basically the rest of the bathroom and then ending with
the toilet just before the floor.
Of course of course you want to sweep and mop your way out of
the bathroom when cleaning it. OK, but usually I start by
either putting something into the toilet bowl or doing a pre
clean and then putting something into the toilet bowl because I
don't want to have to do a lot of scrubbing.
I want that chemical to have time to do its work.
After that initial swish where I just make sure the inside of the
bowl is coated with that. OK.
If I'm feeling really ambitious, sometimes I'll scrub a shower or
bathtub during my bathroom cleaning session, but often I do
that separately when I'm getting into the tub or getting out of
the tub or I'm in the shower. It's kind of like the whole
thing where I don't want to have to put away clean dishes every
time I go to wash dishes or every time I go to cook dinner.
I like to break things up into smaller tasks, so I'm often
cleaning the tub and shower separately from my bathroom
cleaning session. A basic bathroom cleaning
session by by my definition, involves your sink and vanity
and faucets and mirror. You know, to a lesser extent,
the cabinet switch plates. You know, those are bonus tasks
that you do during deeper cleaning sessions.
You may or may not, you know, get to every single surface
today. And of course, cleaning all
parts of the toilet inside and out and then the bathroom floor.
Those are kind of the basics, OK, But maybe you have bonus
tasks in your bathroom that you have time for today, like
dusting fixtures or scrubbing baseboards.
I do clean my bathroom baseboards fairly often, but the
one behind the toilet gets cleaned more often because when
you're down on your hands and knees cleaning the base of the
toilet, that's a good time to clean that back baseboard and
just, you know, clean everything around the toilet.
OK. In case of some kind of misses,
whether it's your guests missing the toilet, their kids, your own
family, you just want to cover that base to, you know, deal
with any little accidents, so to speak.
But it also tends to get dusty down there.
I definitely like to clean the perimeter of my bathroom floors
by hand and clean the, the, the baseboards.
I've said this before, but your guests have nothing better, and
you and your family members sometimes have nothing better to
do when sitting on the toilet than to look at the baseboards.
Although nowadays a lot of people are on their phones,
definitely people are going to look at your baseboard.
They're probably not. Your guests are probably not
surfing their phone when they just quickly use your restroom.
So that's definitely the priority.
Baseboard in my mind are the bathroom baseboards.
You know, when you're actually expecting company, you're more
likely to clean baseboards in other rooms of the house.
But I caution against that. You want baseboards to be
included more often in your regular cleaning sessions.
You know, if you go to clean your living room in one of these
episodes and there's not a lot of clutter to deal with, scrub a
baseboard. It's going to be so much easier
to plan a get together when your house doesn't need all these
deep cleaning tasks and you just need to touch it up for guests.
How nice would that be? Let's get that bathroom cleaned
up before we get into kind of Part 2 of this episode.
It's not always going to be this way.
I'm just kind of pressed for time right now, so I don't have
time to make an edit to separate episodes.
So that's the way I'm doing it. This time.
I'll talk more about my job situation, what I've been doing
in the bonus episode, but let's get that vanity area clean.
Let's scrub that bathroom countertop.
Let's scrub that sink. Let's clean the mirror and
faucets. Maybe you use a micro fiber
cloth and some glass cleaning spray and clean your mirror by
hand. Or maybe you're like me and you
like to attach the micro fiber cloth to some sort of mop and
mop the mirror. Swiffers are great for that and
it, it works so well. It just, it really does it.
It makes cleaning the mirror fun for me.
And I just got hooked on it because my master bathroom has
such a huge mirror, lots of natural light coming into the
bathroom and you can just see every smudge.
So I like to just systematically mop that mirror with my Swiffer
instead of having a Swiffer pad attached to it.
I have the microfiber cloth. It might work with the Swiffer
pad. I've never tried it.
But I don't know, you know, how some some cleaning products
could cloud glass and some don't?
I don't know. But maybe it's something to try.
Maybe it's not. Yeah, let's make sure that once
you've cleaned your vanity area and you've cleaned the exterior
part of your toilet and give them the bowl and other scrub
that your bathroom has fresh clean towels and extra rolls of
toilet paper. You know, let's let's check
inventory. Do you need to purchase
something? And Speaking of decluttering
while they're while you're cleaning, do you have some
products in the bathroom you need to get rid of?
Sometimes you've got to just be honest with yourself about
makeup, hair care products, skin care products that you just
weren't that thrilled about and you're not using anymore.
I've been known to take some shampoos I didn't like and put
them into the toilet and just use them as a toilet bowl
cleaner. You know, on a day where I
didn't necessarily have anything to put in my toilet bowl, you
know, soap is soap and you can definitely, you know, multitask
with some of these ingredients that you have in your house
rather than just throwing them away.
More often than not, if I'm not thrilled with a shampoo, I put
it in the kids shower because, you know, boys with short hair
are not typically that worried about what kind of shampoo
they're using. Whereas my teenage daughter and
I like certain ones. But I've also been known to just
scrub a toilet with an unwanted shampoo.
So as you're going through drawers, you know, maybe don't
throw away a shampoo that you could use for another purpose.
And I'm not saying it's the most effective way to clean a toilet,
but it's better than nothing on a day where you've run out of
stuff. But maybe you do need to toss
some products and, you know, don't beat yourself up over
money spent. You know, think of it as an
experiment. You needed to try some some
products to eliminate them and find the right ones.
And sometimes that's a process. OK, so be thinking about things
that you can declutter out of your bathroom and of course,
toss any empty shampoo containers or body washes from
the shower. You know, more often than not,
when you see a lot of bottles, it could be that people are, you
know, purchasing new ones or adding new ones and not getting
rid of the old empty ones. I don't know why, but it
happens, folks. And then of course, you're going
to want to sweep and mop your way out of the bathroom.
If it's a tiny bathroom, you could combine the sweeping and
mopping into one step. That's what I do in my tinier
bathroom. I like to use the the Swiffer
pads that are designed to go on the mop.
I like to use those just to clean the bathroom floor and
baseboards by hand, and I do it in much the same way that a
person would wipe a kitchen countertop with a damp cloth.
Maybe after making toast, they're grabbing up those crumbs
while also wiping down the countertop and cleaning it.
They're cleaning the debris and wiping it down in one fell
swoop. Why can't we do that with
floors? Well, we can.
It's just not that efficient on a huge expanse of flooring.
In my larger bathroom, I'm going to sweep in a different step and
I'm going to mop and you know, occasionally I'm going to clean
the exterior perimeter of the floor, you know, by hand.
But in that smaller bathroom, I find it so much easier to clean
it by hand. And it doesn't have to be a pre
moistened Swiffer pad. You could do it with paper
towels. I remember a couple times I was
expecting company. I just went to town in the kids
bathroom with some Windex and paper towels and that included
the floor. OK, sometimes you need to think
outside the box. Another tip for those of you
with toddlers where you're supervising them in the bathtub,
but they're kind of old enough. I'm not talking about a baby
that's going to just topple over, but you know, older
toddlers and preschoolers where you've got to keep an eye on
them where they're, you know, when they're in the bathtub.
So you're stuck in the bathroom, but you're you're just letting
them play basically while you have a visual on them.
That can be a great time to just clean your bathroom floor with a
damp towel. If you don't have your cleaning
products handy, you know, there's something to be said for
that, you know, dip that towel in their bubble bath and, you
know, scrub your countertop and then the floor with it.
You know, you, you, you want to use these hidden moments to kind
of clean as you go in life. That'll make your house look
better in between deeper cleaning sessions.
At this time, I'm going to wrap this up for those of you who are
listening to the free version. And it could be that you are a
supporter, but that the full version hasn't been edited and
come out yet. I I do want to try to get these
out both out today, but it's your choice if you're going to
be listening to both, whether you re listen to the beginning
or Fast forward on the bonus. But I do ask that those of you
when you do listen to the free episodes, whether you're a
supporter or not, that you try to let those commercials play
rather than Fast forward them. I will admit, when I'm listening
to Dateline podcasts in the car, these crime podcasts on road
trips, I do hit that button to Fast forward the commercials.
But Dateline isn't, you know, hurting for that money from the
commercial. Let's put it that way.
For, you know, when you're supporting a small creator like
me, it does help us if you let the ads play.
That goes for YouTube. It goes for everything.
By the way, there are a few of you who are listening to this on
YouTube. There's not really a way to
access the bonus episodes on YouTube yet, so you do need to
listen to a podcast app to unlock those or Patreon would be
another option. I'm going to wrap up this
portion of the episode and then the rest of it's just going to
be for financial supporters. For those of you who are ending
it here, thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate each and every one of you.
And as always, happy cleaning. I'll talk to you in the next
episode.