Glue it on to the board and then you go over it with Modge Podge.
I'm Ronnie and you're listening to Clean With Me, the podcast
where I walk you through cleaning your house step by
step. When you clean along with this
show, you'll get more done in less time, so you can spend the
rest of your day doing what matters most to you.
Thanks for joining me. In today's episode, I'm going to
talk you through cleaning your kitchen and I'm also going to
give you some unique decorating ideas.
Let's get right into it. It's time to gear up for our
cleaning session. Maybe you need to get fixed up
for the day so that you're feeling presentable.
You might want to slip into something comfortable yet
presentable that you don't mind cleaning in.
You can also, if you're already like dressed for work or
something, put on an apron to protect your clothing.
Aprons aren't just for cooking. Sometimes I put on an apron to
clean and do dishes if I'm in something really nice.
I mean, more often than not I'm not in an apron, but there are
situations other than cooking that call for an apron if you
need to be dressed up for whatever reason.
But a lot of you just need to put on something comfortable yet
presentable. Maybe you need to run a brush
through your hair or put it up. Maybe you need to wash your
face, put on some moisturizer, and whatever your minimums are.
As far as makeup, if you wear makeup, remember if you look
good, you feel good. So it's important to get fixed
up early each day, even if you're a full time homemaker or
you work from home. Or maybe you're already ready.
Another way to gear up for this cleaning session would be to
start a load of laundry. OK, if you're new to the show, I
often recommend starting a load of laundry at the beginning of a
cleaning session, because then when you're done, you can switch
that load from the washer into the dryer.
And it just feels good when your machines are working for you
while you're doing housework. So I like to get those machines
running. And by machines and by machines,
I mean the dishwasher, if you have one, the washing machine
and maybe the dryer. Maybe you need to switch the
clothes from the washer into the dryer and start a new load.
And we're going to be cleaning the kitchen, so we'll talk about
the dishwasher in a few minutes. But your first machine that
you're going to want to get running is probably your washing
machine. And if you don't have enough
clothing for a full load today, maybe it's a good time to strip
your sheets and pillowcases and get those washing or wash your
comforter or duvet cover. And I know I can talk faster
than you can do these things. I'm just giving you a few
different ideas of how to kick off this cleaning session.
When cleaning the kitchen, it's important to take out the trash
and reline it because chances are you have some trash in your
kitchen and you need a place to put stuff.
Sometimes the front entrance of your home is in disarray and you
want to kind of start at the front door and straighten up a
little bit in case your spouse gets home early or someone
knocks at the door. That first impression area is
important. Or maybe you need to get your
house smelling fresh. Maybe you need to start a wax
warmer or an essential oil diffuser.
Maybe you need to sprinkle your carpet with some carpet fresh,
or maybe you need to run your garbage disposal.
I'm going to give you a couple more minutes to do whatever you
need to do to gear up for your cleaning session.
Again, you might need to get presentable and ready for the
day. You might need to start some
laundry. You might need to straighten up
your front entrance. Take out the trash.
I mean, you probably for sure should take out the trash, but
whatever needs to be done, now's the time.
And then the next step is gathering up dishes.
By the way, this episode is going to be a 2 parter.
For this session, we're focusing on the kitchen, but in Part 2 we
are going to continue to the rest of the house.
I'm going to entitle the episode either Decorating Ideas or the
Power of Decor, and then there's going to be a Part 2 of that
same title. Special thanks to those who are
already supporting the show, which unlocks those longer bonus
episodes. And those bonus episodes are
probably already getting advertised to you if you're
listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
But to learn more about that, you can visit my website, which
is clean with mepodcast.com. And of course, I'll put a link
in the episode notes. And while even just listening to
these free episodes helps me, I really appreciate those who go
the extra mile and subscribe to the show.
You're really not going to be on the full program unless you also
subscribe to bonus content. But I understand not everyone's
able to subscribe. OK, by now you've done whatever
you needed to do to gear up for your cleaning session.
If you have not already done so, it's time to gather up dishes
from around the house. This could be a coffee mug on
your night stand. It could be your husbands ice
cream bowl on his night stand from last night.
It could be a forgotten fork and plate in a teenagers room.
It could be dishes left on the table.
You probably have that rule if you have kids, where they're
supposed to clear and rinse their dishes, but sometimes they
forget and leave something on the kitchen table, dining room
table, living room. You know where those dirty cups
and other dishes might be lurking.
It's time to gather them all up and take them to the sink.
And I'll give you a couple minutes to do that.
Something to keep in mind while cleaning is the pre clean is an
important step. If you just jump into deep
cleaning, you're going to be working around a lot of
obstacles. And let's face it, cleaning the
actual surfaces is often the easiest part of your housework.
It can be tedious kind of putting everything where it goes
and tidying up, but that's such an important step in cleaning
and I definitely recommend doing your pre clean 1st.
And when it comes to doing dishes, part of the pre cleaning
is getting all the dishes to the sink or at least next to the
sink. It doesn't take long, but you
don't want to find dirty dishes. After you thought you were done
washing, the next step in your kitchen pre clean is to put away
any clean dishes. Those of you who hand wash
probably have a drying rack, a drying pad, or even just a towel
for drying your clean dishes. And if you're like me, you don't
towel dry them immediately and put them away.
So now's the time to empty that drying rack and get those dishes
put away. More often than not, I let stuff
air dry. But what you want to avoid is
just kind of adding to the pile. You don't want to be playing
dish Jenga where you're making that drying rack pile higher and
higher. And there are a couple reasons
for this. One, something could fall off
and break. Two, it can make your kitchen
look cluttered to have just mountains of clean dishes.
I mean, obviously clean dishes are better better than dirty,
but it can still make your kitchen look cluttered.
And three, and this is probably the most surprising, 1, you will
actually work harder if you don't have to slow down and
think about positioning that clean dish or where to put it.
If you have an empty drying rack, you're washing, rinsing,
placing things in the drying rack, it takes a lot of the
thought out of it and you can go a lot quicker.
And I know most of you know all this, but some people are new to
the show, so I like to reiterate some of these key points.
And of course, emptying the dishwasher could be one of the
steps to putting away your clean dishes.
If you have a dishwasher at our house we do a combination of
washing in the dishwasher and hand washing.
So when I'm putting away clean dishes, it involves emptying the
drying rack and the dishwasher both.
And sometimes my husband and I are working together.
I'm emptying the dishwasher and drying rack while he starts on
washing the dishes. But I realized that a lot of you
are working alone right now. When I listen to a cleaning
podcast, it's during my own personal cleaning session when
I'm home alone or everybody's sleeping.
So that may be your current situation as well.
So I'm going to give you a couple more minutes to put away
the clean dishes. If you finish early, obviously
start washing your dishes, whatever that means for you,
whether you're pre rinsing things and loading them into the
dishwasher or your hand washing. And not everybody has a backlog
of dishes who's out there listening right now.
I don't know what your current situation is, but what I'm
hoping that you do is stay in the kitchen for the duration of
the episode and just look for things to do.
Because if it's a day when you don't have a lot of dishes to
deal with, that's the perfect time to go deeper with your
cleaning and maybe wipe down the walls or clean a baseboard or
clean the inside of your microwave.
By the way, if you have any heavily soiled items, you want
to get those soaking at the beginning of your dishwashing
session. Maybe there is a pot and a pan
that you cooked in or a container in your refrigerator
that had some old leftovers in it.
And you remove those leftovers and toss them and now you have a
container with kind of dried on food or baked on food.
If these are your cooking pans or whatever, you want to get
those things pre rinsed and fill them up with hot soapy water,
Get those soaking and they don't necessarily need to soak
overnight or anything. Often just getting the difficult
items soaking at the beginning of your dishwashing session is
enough because by the time you've washed all the easy
stuff, those other items have had time to sit.
You know, the dish soap and the hot water has done a lot of the
work for you. And then you can wash those
items last. It's just a good use of your
time. So once you've put away all your
clean dishes, get those difficult items soaking and then
start washing your easier items. OK, your glasses, your plates,
your bowls, your silverware. And sometimes a glass could be a
difficult item. You know, a forgotten glass
could have something dried on in the bottom of it that might be
one of the items you're going to have soaking while you wash the
rest of the stuff. But whether you're washing a few
sink loads by hand, filling up the dishwasher and starting it,
or a combination of both, just be working on your dishes,
whatever that means for you. And if you finish early, start
cleaning the surfaces of your kitchen from the top down, of
course, while you're working. I wanted to talk a little bit
about kitchen Decor. A while back I went through this
phase of making these decoupage plaques and it's kind of a
unique idea so I thought I'd throw it out there.
But of course there are pre made versions of these things that
you could buy in certain stores or order online.
And what I'm talking about is using recipes as decorations.
OK, For example, I made one where I typed up the recipe for
chocolate chip cookies. I typed it up and I also had
purchased some stickers from Hobby Lobby.
You can get sheets of stickers. You want to get the flat ones.
Not, you know, puffy stickers or anything, but I had these sheets
of stickers that were a baking theme.
So I typed up the recipe, you know, in a cute font or
whatever, you know, the right size that I wanted.
And then after I printed it, I put the stickers on it like
little mixing bowls and oven mitts and cookies and things
like that, and kind of positioned them artistically
around the wording of the recipe.
And obviously there are a lot of nuances to creating these
decoupage plaques. So if you decide to do it,
definitely do your research online.
This isn't going to be just a super detailed explanation of
how to do it. I'm mainly just giving you the
idea about decorating with recipes in the kitchen.
And the point is to use recipes that you want to be able to look
at often, things that you make often.
Another one that I made is the recipe for tortillas, and I
actually still have that one hanging up.
And sometimes when you make a recipe a lot, you have it
memorized. But if you're like me, you go
through phases where you don't make something for a long time
and then you don't have the ingredients memorized.
Or you might want to post these recipes for school aged kids.
And I get it. There are cookbooks.
I have a recipe binder where I print recipes or tear them out
of cookbooks that I'm getting rid of and I put them in a
binder and sheet protectors. That way, you know, if you have
grubby hands while you're cooking or whatever, you're not
getting, you know, batter on the recipes themselves and you can
kind of wipe the sheets clean when you're done.
There's definitely a place for that.
But in this episode, I'm talking about decor.
Anyway. After you've printed the sheet,
you've placed the little decorative stickers, and
obviously the stickers are optional, but it made it 10
times cuter. You have a board that's already
ready, like a little plaque or something maybe that you
purchased at Hobby Lobby. Or if you're using just more
rustic wood, you might have had to sand and cut your own wood.
I mean, it's up to you how how deep into this this hobby you
get. But it's pretty cheap.
I mean, to get just a plaque that's already smooth and
beveled and then to glue your sheet onto it and you can cut
it, you know, in the size you want or whatever, glue it onto
the board. And then you go over it with
Modge Podge, you know, you use like a a sponge on a stick or a
paintbrush or whatever, and you do several coats of it to where
the paper is kind of embedded in the wood and it looks like more
like it was painted on or something like that.
Be working in your kitchen by now.
Some of you are done with your dishes.
It might be time to wipe down your cabinets, the front of your
large appliances, like the outside of your refrigerator,
the outside of your microwave, your stove top, the control
panel, the front of the oven, the front of your dishwasher,
you know, and of course, your countertops.
But no judgment here. If you're facing a dishwaster
today and you're just still plugging away on dishes, the
important thing is to keep working in the kitchen.
And then eventually you're going to sweep or vacuum the floors
and then mop again. There are a lot of nuances to
creating these decoupage projects, so I don't recommend,
you know, making one of these recipe plaques until you've done
a little bit of research into decoupage.
Again, it's been a long time since I made these.
It was years ago, but another type of decoupage art that I did
was I would take either like a sheet of paper from an old
hymnal. OK, if you know, you know, some
of you go to churches that still use hymnals or you grew up in
those kinds of churches. But you could take like a
favorite hymn and then you could take a lighter and burn around
the edges of that sheet. You burn a little bit, blow it
out, burn a little bit and blow it out so that it kind of had,
you know, so that it has jagged burnt edges around the page
without burning, you know, the the part with the, the music,
you know, the sheet music and the words or whatever.
It does kind of warp the paper a little bit.
So what you do is you turn it upside down, you know, face down
on the ironing board and then you iron the sheet to get it
flat again. And then same process as with
the other projects, you glue it to the little plaque and by
gluing it, the Modge Podge serves as both the glue and the
kind of glaze coating or whatever.
And there are other products, shellac, things like that, that
you can use. You can use sprays.
In fact, after I would attach a paper and then go over it with
the decoupage and do a few coats of that.
I would often finish with a spray so that it wouldn't be
tacky or whatever. Again, you're going to, you're
going to need to do a deep dive online before you begin one of
these projects unless you've already done decoupage work
before. But you can get really creative
with different fonts and different stickers.
And it's not even just for the recipes.
You can create decorations for virtually anywhere in your
house. You can make custom gifts for
people for like Scripture versus Old English fonts look best.
You can get a stick set of stickers that has crosses and
Bibles and things like that. I mean, you don't want to go
crazy with the stickers. You, you want to use them
sparingly or you may prefer not to use them at all.
So anyway, that's my idea. Decorate with recipes.
It's super cute. They make great gifts.
I mean how cute of a wedding gift would it be if you knew
someone's colors and they're they're decorating style and you
made them a recipe plaque for their kitchen?
It'd be super cute. Obviously, be careful when
buying people decor because people are kind of particular
about how they decorate their house.
But if you know the person well enough, you can create the
perfect custom gift. So that's just the idea of the
day. But I wanted to say that when
you decorate your house, it helps to keep you excited about
doing your housework. You've got to love how your
house looks clean. So I encourage you to decorate
each room of your house. And it doesn't have to cost a
lot. And I have purchased things
before. You might say I'm overwhelmed
right now. I can't take on any new hobbies
or whatever. I have purchased things before
that had recipes. Years ago we had this ceramic
bowl that we got at like one of those trading posts that you
find like in New Mexico and Arizona along the along the
highway. We had like a porcelain dish
that had a recipe for salsa and it was a super pretty dish and I
had it displayed in the kitchen. Things don't last long in our
house. We move a lot.
I have 6 kids and four grandkids, so a lot happens to
stuff over the years, but I've had a lot of cute things over
the years and that was one of them.
I think that's where I got the idea of when I got into
decoupage. At first it wasn't to post
recipes in my kitchen, but I remembered that dish with the
salsa recipe. So that was kind of the
inspiration for using recipes in my decor and it is nice to make
a recipe without having to touch the cookbook.
But I've also seen at some people's houses, they have a
little cookbook holder and then they just open the cookbook to
the page that they're going to be using, but then they don't
have to touch it because it's kind of displayed in this like
book holder. So that's another idea.
Hopefully by now you're done with your dishes and you've
wiped down the surfaces of the kitchen.
If not, you might want to pause the episode or just be doing
something other than what I'm talking about.
But a lot of you are ready to sweep or vacuum the floor.
Maybe you have a vacuum that's good on hard floors, or maybe
you need to sweep, but now's the time to get those crumbs off of
the floor. And even if you have a dog that
eats up a lot of the food that gets dropped, they're not
dealing with the sand and the the sediment that can collect on
your kitchen floor. And let's face it, there might,
if you've got young children, there might be sticky spots on
your floor. Kids are notorious for spilling
juice. And then all the sudden you hear
that dreaded sticky sound when you walk into the kitchen and
shoes or where's your barefoot and you feel the stickiness.
You've got to get it swept so that you can mop.
I love mopping my kitchen floor but I don't love sweeping.
So I recently got one of those shark vacuums that's really good
on hard floors so that my pre clean can be a vacuum instead of
a mop. But you still need a broom and
dustpan in your kitchen for when you knock egg shells off the
counter or you break a pickle jar.
And you may be thinking, why would I buy a vacuum for the
kitchen when it only takes a minute to sweep?
But some of us have just a large expanse of tile.
A lot of houses nowadays are designed with a large eat in
kitchen instead of a separate formal dining room.
Or even houses with a formal dining room also have an eat in
kitchen at times. So if you just have a small
U-shaped kitchen like you're in an apartment or just your house
has a small kitchen, yeah sweeping with a broom is no big
deal. And some people like sweeping
more than others. One way to make your sweeping
easier in a large kitchen, if you don't have a good vacuum for
it, is to use one of those dust mops.
I call it a push broom, but a push broom is actually something
a little bit different. It's something that's more heavy
duty that you know your husband might use out in the garage or
something. Okay, but the dust mop is a
great way to kind of get all of that debris that's in the middle
of your floor into a pile. You'll still need to do edge
work with the regular traditional broom that's going
to be more effective at getting under the countertops and stuff,
you know? But a lot of times you can sweep
the middles with the push broom, then do the edge work and also
use the push broom to get that debris pile swept into the
dustpan. And there are also machines that
do the sweeping and mopping in one step.
We all have certain tasks that we don't like doing.
I encourage you to invest in whatever tool you need.
I mean, some of you might want to get like a Roomba vacuum that
does the vacuuming of your house.
I would rather that the members of my family just exercise while
vacuuming. Some of you might have an
exercise regimen where you're already getting exercise,
whether you're going for walks, riding a stationary bike,
lifting weights. I mean, you might not need to
vacuum as a form of exercise. So getting a Roomba might make
sense for you. My point is, we're all different
as far as which household tasks we struggle with the most.
For example, if my dishwasher breaks down, I'm going to buy a
new one, even though technically we could just wash the dishes by
hand and save some money by not purchasing another dishwasher.
You see what I'm saying? But it's a priority for me
because when I do the dishes, I like to load all the small stuff
into the dishwasher. And, you know, maybe having a
special tool for vacuuming or mopping your kitchen or the rest
of your house would make your house work a lot easier for you.
Hopefully by now you've swept or run a ran a vacuum over your
kitchen floor. It's time to mop the floor, Get
your floor super wet while mopping.
You can do the thing where you take a large bath towel and I
usually just pull one out of The Dirty clothes hamper.
I'm not going to do this with a clean towel and only do this if
if you're stable enough on your feet to do so.
But I kind of walk with the, you know, barefoot with the towel
under my feet, sliding each foot.
Hopefully you can picture what I'm motioning here.
But you know, walking that towel around and that dries the floor
right away. So you don't have to worry about
somebody walking in and either slipping and falling or getting
your freshly mopped floor dirty. And a lot of times, you know,
drying it with the towel is part of the cleaning process.
It gets your floor even cleaner. So that's one way of doing it.
Or you might want to use like a Swiffer with the pre moistened
pads. There's also like the Swiffer
wet jet where you're actually like spraying.
But let's face it, sometimes you need to really scrub your floor
with a more traditional mop. OK, we don't use the Swiffer
every time. Sometimes I'm just scrubbing it
with a string mop and mopping it can take a while, so maybe
listen to some of your favorite music after this.
Hopefully you have like an upbeat playlist to clean by.
I hope you got a lot done during this episode.
I'm going to talk more about decorating and how it can help
motivate you to keep your house clean in Part 2, which is for
financial supporters. But even just listening to these
free episodes helps me. I appreciate each and everyone
of you. And as always, happy cleaning.
I'll talk to you in the next episode.