How to Clean Everything in Your Home
I love dusting. There is something extremely satisfying about swiping a piece of cloth across a surface and watching it instantly brighten, or pulling a few books off a bookshelf, admiring a book-shaped outline of garbage you never knew existed, and then doing it. disappear.
I dust off every Friday and take it seriously. I dust not only the coffee table surface, but also the legs (and their little decorative crevices). I move the potted plants around to catch whatever is underneath. I wash the windowsills and baseboards every two weeks.
If you’re hesitant to start dusting off because you don’t have any special tools – or if that’s why you’re constantly telling yourself you’re going to put off dusting for another month – I’ll be the first to say you won’t. I need a feather wand, a special Swiffer, or something like that. Yes, a dedicated tool can help you remove dust from these hard-to-reach crevices, but just about any soft cloth will work for normal house dust. (When I was growing up, we wore worn-out T-shirts, and I’m pretty sure you have at least one of them.)
When you have a dust removal tool – whether you’re swinging a feather duster, swinging a dust rag, or getting around with a cotton paper towel (which is a last resort) – you just, well, move it across the surface. dusty surface until the dust is gone.
It is not so difficult.
Except for the parts where it is.
The first slightly cumbersome aspect of dust removal is that the dust does not technically “go away.” After all, matter cannot be created or destroyed – in which case it simply moves to another surface. Luckily for you, most of the dust should be transferred to your boot. In fact, I often wet the corner of a dust rag – with water or a mixture of water, dish soap and white vinegar, depending on the surface I’m washing – so that the dust gets directly onto the rag. This gives me a little extra friction and surfactant for this sticky dirt.
However, you must be prepared for at least some of the dust to be released into the air (which is why the “dust mask” was invented, although most people will not need a dust mask for weekly dust collection in the house). You also need to be prepared for any dust that your vacuum cleaner doesn’t pick up will eventually find that gravity is a thing and travel to your floor.
This is why you should always start by picking up dust from the highest surfaces in your home and then from lower surfaces such as baseboards. This is why any good dust removal project ultimately turns into a vacuuming or sweeping project, depending on your preferred method of cleaning the floors.
This is another onerous aspect of dust cleaning: it is a task that can easily spawn additional tasks, whether you are sweeping the knocked out bunnies of dust off the floor or telling yourself that since you have already removed all of your books from the bookshelf, you are you might as well reorganize them by color.
(By the way, I don’t take all the books off my bookshelf every week. This is most often once a month. The rest of the time it’s enough to wipe down with a dust rag in front of my books.)
As soon as you finally think you’ve finished dusting your home, you turn off the overhead light in your living room – and suddenly you see all the little bits of dust and dirt that you missed the first time. Bright overhead light makes dust less visible; side light, like a ray of sun peeking through your blinds, makes remaining dust apparent.
At this point, you have two options. If you are still holding the dust removal tool, you can run it again over any surface that is still dirty. But if you’re in a rush, or if you’ve already thrown your dirty rag in the laundry basket and don’t want to fish it out again, tell yourself that you will catch it the next time you clean it.
This article was originally published on May 12, 2020 and has been updated on March 29, 2021 to reflect the current Lifehacker style guidelines.