Fred's Book Club: Keep It Clean!

Welcome to our Wednesday "Hump Day" feature called the Humpback Writers, because we thought it was funny last year when we started this and we're stubbornly continuing it even though we were wrong. But for those quarantined and unsure of the day, I can tell you that I am indeed posting this on Wednesday.

It's time for spring cleaning, and in these germaphobic times of Wuhan coronavirus it is especially important. So I pulled this one out of the library:

Coming Clean: Dirty Little Secrets from a Professional Housecleaner by Schar Ward is not the kind of book I would have run out to buy. I was working for a magazine when it was published, and I think we profiled it and included some of Ward's tips. When it appeared on the giveaway table I snatched it up, because I liked the idea of anything that made housecleaning more easy and less rotten, which Schar Ward does. And I did learn a lot about cleaning at that magazine -- the concept of "dwell time," for example.

Here are some excellent tips from Coming Clean:

Toilet cleaning is easier when the water is out of the bowl. To get the water out, dump a pailful of water into the toilet.... Remove blue water and other waterline stains with a pumice stone made for that purpose. A pumice stone is to be used wet. Leave the water in the bowl while you rub at the stains until they are "erased."

To keep a clean house and save time, get rid of everything you don't need! Just pretend you are going to move to another house or an apartment. As you are going through your things, ask yourself these three questions:
* Can anyone in my family use this?
* How frequently will we use it?
* If I keep it, how will I store it?

Don't use wood in a bathroom except for doors, moldings and cabinet fronts. Water rots wood and eventually, no matter what it's coated with, it'll look bad.

And, since we love our books here at Fred's Book Club:

Dust books at least once a month with the vacuum brush attachment. Yearly, remove all books from their shelves and wipe them with a (barely) damp cloth.

The tips are generally divided into sections by room (living room, kitchen, kids' rooms, etc.), types of surfaces, supplies, and even cleaning philosophy. She actually doesn't include much on disinfecting in this concise (117-page) guide. She says disinfectant cleaner is "a must for kitchens and baths," of course, and although she has some product recommendations, she says disinfectant and antibacterial cleaners are all about the same. In other words, they will all kill those nasty germs if you use them as directed. And she recommends kitchen counters get a good disinfectant cleaning once a week.

I have also taken the liberty to scan this section, one of a few illustrated bits, because it has her instructions for folding fitted sheets, a task that has brought strong men to tears:

There are a lot of other great tidbits in this book, not only about how to clean, but even how to think low-maintenance when building or redecorating your home (such as: "Get the best grade stainless steel sink you can afford" for the kitchen, because "Lower grade stainless steel doesn't wear as well").

Ward's other books include 2017's Teaching Children to Clean: The Ready-Set-Go Solution That Works! And if this solution really does get kids to clean the house, I just want to say, I think the Pulitzer committee missed its shot back in 2017.