We don’t remember our house needing so much recovery from summer before. It seems that children get really creative in finding new ways to create cleaning opportunities as they get older. Not to brag, but we have a lot of room to cover, too. It’s no mansion, but we keep the kind of urban household where the home keeps moving upwards. That means we’re constantly walking up and down two flights of stairs–plus the stairs down to the basement where we keep all of the cleaning products.
So we go to the third floor thinking that we have all that we need to do some cleaning, and discover all kinds of exciting new developments which send us back to the basement and then back to the third floor. It is maddening. But then we decided that it wasn’t too demeaning to actually start thinking like a housekeeper. No, we don’t have the luxury of a big cart to push around, or plenty of samples of free shampoo and soap. But we’ve managed to save ourselves plenty of steps and some wear to our stairs.
We began with a cleaning bucket. A pretty good one, too, straight from the dollar store. It’s green and metal and has two handles on the side. You can also go with a cleaning caddy. The best ones look like big plastic shoeboxes with handles, and have containers for being organized. We don’t mind sorting through our bucket. Did we mention that it’s green?
We started with a few basics–mostly planned around the surprises kept finding. We have a few pairs of cleaning gloves, a few sponges, and a range of cleaning cloths. That’s one from the kitchen that can scrub, plus some polishing cloths and a dusting cloth–and some paper towels for the windows.
We’ll go ahead and do a product endorsement by noting that we’re never without our Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. That’s for walls and counters and…well, a lot of things. We have a tub and tile cleaner, along with a glass cleaner and some dish soap liquid. There’s a powder cleaner (usually Bon Ami) and Goo Gone. There’s a bathroom on every floor, too, so we’re carrying around some toilet bowl cleaner. Those are our basics–and we’ve done pretty well with our bucket, too.
Oh, and we’ve added some Bar Keepers Friend, but only because we have to mix our beloved Cream of Tartar with too many things outside of the kitchen. From there, you’re free to add as many things as you can possibly anticipate for your own household cleaning. But if it’s like ours, you’ll always be challenged to anticipate more…
