Best DIY Cleaning Tips for Hard-to-Reach Places
Spring might be the time for cleaning up your home after you’ve been cooped up inside all winter long. However, summer is an excellent time of the year for deep cleaning. We’re talking removing things from shelves and dusting, climbing up on top of stuff, basically cleaning parts of your home that you’ve completely forgotten about.
Better yet, many of these types of things can be cleaned without buying fancy new products or tools, instead using items you probably already have lying around. Here are our top items to clean using DIY methods this summer.
Refrigerator and Freezer
It can’t be understated how good it feels to open your fridge and freezer and find it sparkling clean, unblemished and unstained by old food or grimy markings. Refrigerators are one of the least frequently cleaned items in most people’s homes, because they’re full of food and drink and it can be a hassle to remove items.
For the same reason, it’s crucial to make sure they’re as clean as can be; food and drinks are things you put in your body, and you don’t want them sitting in filth. To clean your fridge, simply remove everything (we know, we know, it’s annoying), then wipe down the surfaces inside using a dish towel with whatever cleaning agent you have on hand, or use a mixture of water, vinegar, and dish soap.
(Heads up: If you don’t have white vinegar at home already you might want to get some, it’s going to be mentioned a lot)
Ovens
Most ovens have a “cleaning” setting, which cranks up the heat extremely high to melt away the grime and grease and filth that builds up over time. Depending on your oven, this might work just fine for you. But for others, the oven’s cleaning function may not be up to par, as sometimes it does little more than get hotter than usual.
To deep clean your oven, you’ll want to make sure you won’t need to use it within the next day or so, so fire up the grill for a few days. Using baking soda and vinegar, make a sort of paste. Then, removing the racks from your oven (you can clean those at the sink or elsewhere), rub the paste all over your oven’s interior. You should let that sit overnight if possible, and then scrape away, using a spatula if you need to. You can repeat this process, or begin wiping the cleaned oven with vinegar to wipe away the remaining spots.
Bathroom
Hopefully you didn’t use up all your vinegar paste from the oven, because if you’ve got a dirty ceramic tub, it’s the perfect tool to clean. Simply do the same thing again, by applying the paste all over the tub. If the paste is too thick, you can add some water from the tub.
Once again, wipe the paste off after however long you need, then repeat if it didn’t quite take. After that, wipe down surfaces with another mixture of dish soap and vinegar, or just use water and vinegar. You can use this same solution on the entire bathroom.
Baseboards
Baseboards and crown molding, if you have it, are often overlooked but very important to an aesthetically pleasing, clean home. It’s hard to explain how much of a difference such a small part of your home can make when it’s clean or dirty.
As a bonus, baseboards are really easy to clean, though you should sweep up immediately after, and definitely make sure not to sweep, vacuum, etc. beforehand. Use a dish cloth or magic eraser with either plain water or more vinegar to make those baseboards shine.
Fan Blades
The tops of your fan’s blades get dirty extremely quickly and are unfortunately not usually visible, so it’s hard to know just how filthy they are. This is something you should absolutely try to clean as soon as you can and with at least some frequency, as dust on your fan blades can impact the air quality in your home.
To accomplish this, you can use a duster that extends, or a stool or ladder. Once again, it’s unwise to sweep or clean your floors before doing this task.
Walls
If you come home and find someone cleaning the walls, the truth is, it’s going to look kind of silly. But there is a lot of dust and grime that can cling to walls, especially in rooms like the bathroom and kitchen where water and oil vapors are often in the air.
Once again, you can use vinegar or just damp rags to clean the walls of your home, which you can do right after you do the baseboards.
If you’d like us to do the hard part for you, contact us today to get your home cleaned. Have other questions or need some other tips? Call Custom Maid today at 918-376-4114 or visit our website at custommaidok.com!