Less clutter=less dust

Today I tackled the second half of our large, open "living room", the part which officially is the office/play room/dining room area.  I had a few things going for me:  first, since this part of the house is used consistently, it's also consistently cleaned.  Second, the girls are largely responsible for keeping their portion clean, so I had very little clutter to deal with.  Going into it, I assumed that this part of the house would be much cleaner than the rest has been so far.  At the very least, I assumed I wouldn't have any significantly dirty parts to deal with.

Action Plan:
1.  Clean light fixture
2.  Remove items from each shelf of eight-foot bookcase and dust
3.  Clean window, valance, and blinds
4.  Dust computer desk and office shelves
5.  Dust china cabinet and buffet server
6.  Wipe down floor boards and vacuum

Right away, I ran into a pretty major road block.  In every room I've approached so far, I've moved from the highest point down.  In this case, the highest point was a light fixture in our vaulted ceiling that I estimate to be about 12 feet off the ground.  We have a step ladder, but it's only eight feet tall, and I was (understandably) afraid to climb that high without another adult to spot me or call 911 if I fell and fractured something.  So I skipped the light fixture outright and moved on to the book case.

Our book shelf is one of my favorite pieces of furniture, largely because My Love built it himself.  It's eight feet tall and eight feet wide, and it's been crammed with books, Bibles, office supplies, and toys in alternating proportions for the duration of our residence in the house.  When I considered removing everything from it to dust, it was a daunting task, but I began it with my trusty can of Pledge and a cleaning rag.  The lower shelves, as it turned out, were the cleanest.  I suppose I'm more aware of dust and debris in the areas which the children can reach, though I did have to scrub away a few dingy fingerprints along the floor.  My surprise came as I dusted the top of the bookcase, which has not been cleaned or seen since I first arranged a row of knick-knacks up there the day the book case was finished.  Though nowhere as disgusting as the grime atop the kitchen cabinets, I was shocked at the amount of dust that could accumulate on a surface over time.  It took -- wait for it -- FOUR cleaning rags to remove all the dust; each of them turned grey with use before I pulled another from the closet.  Essentially, I notice that surfaces that no one sees on a daily basis are consistently the dirtiest.  Also, I revisited a lesson from my kitchen cleaning experience:  the fewer things there are to collect dust, the easier they are to clean.  However, the book case doesn't boast dusty wine bottles that I can nonchalantly toss into the garbage.  Instead, every whatchamacallit on the shelves has some sort of sentimental value:  the alpaca will teddy bear from Ecuador; the samurai swords my father bought on a trip to Japan; the Winnie the Pooh figurine hand-painted by an old friend.  I simply resigned myself to wipe down every surface more often and accept that it will repeatedly get dirty (kind of like my kitchen floor).

Cleaning the single window seemed like a breeze; I've done five now, and this one was small.  However, I still haven't figured out how to clean the blinds or remove the screens from outside.  I think I'm going to need to devote a Saturday afternoon to scrubbing windows and screens from the outside.  (Right now, the windows don't look clean because of the outdoor smudges.)

I have heard that you're supposed to use a particular kind of cleaning product and cleaning wipe for electronics, but I don't have one around the house, and I assumed that a tiny amount of water on a slightly-damp soft cloth couldn't hurt anything.  I wiped off our computer tower, monitor, and keyboard.  The dust between individual keys was giving me fits; I think I've seen some kind of telemarketing commercial for a product that blows dust off a keyboard, and it must be the only thing that works, because a cloth just didn't cut it.  I hated to do it, but I left the computer and computer desk only about 99% clean and added "computer keyboard" to my mental list of failed projects that I'll need to re-evaluate at a later date.

All the furniture in our dining room is wood, though it doesn't match; this is also the least-decorated room in the house.  There's one photo of the girls in a large frame, and we also have an antique plate from my grandfather on a stand atop the china cabinet.  That's literally it.  Any guesses on how long it took to clean this quadrant of the room?  Only about 15 minutes, but I do need to go back and clean the light fixture.  It's a hanging one, so I can reach it, but it had been on all morning and was too hot to touch.  I turned it off after dusting the rest of the room, assuming I'd let it cool and then come back to it, but it completely slipped my mind until I sat down to write this post.

I approached the base boards with Lysol wipes (I had to buy a new can over the weekend!), which seems to be the most effective way.  Unlike in the kitchen, I didn't go back over them with a dryer sheet.  I'm going to assume that there is less dust and dog hair blowing around the carpeted area than on the tile.  And...a quick run with the vacuum cleaner, and I was done!

This portion of the house seemed to go by really quickly.  Honestly, it was simple, to, but I didn't "feel" like it was clean when I was done.  I'm not sure whether it was because I skipped a few areas, such as the light fixtures, or because it wasn't as dirty in the first place (which means there wasn't a huge change to notice).  Regardless, I can now say that the common areas in the house are acceptably clean, and that makes me feel like I've accomplished a great deal.

Living room

Day 3:  The Living Room

Our house has what's called an open floor plan.  I'm not entirely sure what that means in architectural terms, but it appears to mean that the common areas -- living room, dining room, and kitchen -- are all basically segments of a single, large room.  It makes our house look bigger, but it also made decorating a bit of a pain.  It also means that my first few days' effort at cleaning the largest part of our house required me to tackle a different portion of the same room each day.

The living room is longer than it is wide, so we have partitioned it off with a couch and a book case.  One side is considered the actual living room, and the other side is our office/play area.  Today, I tackled the living room itself.

Here's the action plan:

1.  Take down and wash curtains

2.  Attempt to clean the blinds AGAIN

3.  Wash insides of windows and window tracks

4.  Clean fan and light fixture

5.  Clean fireplace

6.  Dust all furniture

7.  Vacuum floor

8.  Steam clean carpet

After cleaning the breakfast nook on my first day of work, I knew what to expect with the windows.  When I removed the curtains, I encountered dust and cobwebs.  That didn't particularly please me, but I also wasn't surprised.  A quick trip through the washing machine ended up taking care of the curtains, but I still have yet to find a successful way to clean the blinds.  I earnestly tried to wipe each individual blind piece down with a cloth, but they still didn't come clean.  My Love says that this size blinds cost $5.95 at Lowe's; there may be a few new sets in our future.

Cleaning the fan and lights was an uneventful task except that I was unable to hide the fact that I was climbing something from the kids.  Mini-me stood at the base of the chair and kept up a running dialogue: "Mama, what are you doing?"

"I'm cleaning, sweetie."

"What are you cleaning?"

"I'm cleaning the lights and the fan."

"Oh...how did they get dirty?"

"They just did.  They got dusty, and I need to get the dust off."

"Oh...can I help?"

"No, honey, you're too short."

"But I can climb up on a chair like you and reach them."

"Sweetie, you'd need a bigger chair than this one to be able to reach the lights."

"Well, you could go buy me one."

Eventually, I set she and Cuddles down at the dining room table with some play dough that they had found in an Easter egg hunt at their grandparents' house over the weekend.  They were content to make "crackers", "pancakes", and "pretzels" for the next half hour (at which point, obviously, it was time for lunch).

The "most dirty place in the room" award goes to our fireplace.  I found that incredibly interesting, since it hasn't been used since we moved into the house over four years ago.  It doesn't really get cold enough to need fires around here, and we also don't want to worry with cleaning up ashes or keeping little fingers out of the grate.  I figured I might find some dust in the fireplace, but no real dirt.  Oh, was I wrong!   To begin, I removed a decorative candle stand that we keep in there to keep it from looking stark.  The top few coils were laced with spider webs covered in dust.  As a side note, I abhor spiders.  They make me scream and run the other direction.  I almost stopped cleaning right then, but the fact that the webs were dusty led me to believe that the spider had likely already met his or her demise.  I was correct; I later discovered his/her body underneath a candle that had been lit at Valentine's Day.  As to the task at hand:  I wiped down the candle stand with ACV, which was equally effective at removing dust, spider webs, and ash.  I then wiped down the inside of the fireplace itself.  To my surprise, our flue was open (and I have no idea how it got that way).  I closed the flue, and when I did, a shower of ash fell into the fireplace.  It was actually quite a chore to wipe it all out; when ash gets wet, it simply makes gray and black streaks, so I went through multiple cleaning rags and bowls of ACV in order to get it clean.  My last fireplace task was to dust our screen.  This proved to be the most difficult thing I've done yet other than cleaning the blinds.  Dust particles clung to the mesh screen when I wiped them with the ACV.  I ended up brushing the screen vigorously ("Mama, why are you hitting that?") to dislodge the dust.  That just made the dust float in the air, but I was hoping that whatever surface it landed on would be easier to clean.

A quick pass over the furniture with Pledge and a rag, and I was ready to vacuum.  Yes, again...the Beast had left a trail of dog food crumbs from her bowl to the couch, and the floor looked just as dirty as it had before I vacuumed yesterday.  There was no help from the kids today, as they were busy with peanut-butter-and-local-honey sandwiches (which they would rather than than just about anything else I could make).  And then I paused; in a strange twist of events, steam cleaning the carpets has become My Love's job.  (The one time I tried I left puddles in the carpet.)

It was really pleasant for me to discover that most of the house isn't going to be as dirty as the kitchen was; dusting and vacuuming are chores I actually keep up with pretty consistently, and I'm hopping it will pay off as I work toward having the entire house cleaned at one time.