Read Speed Cleaning Online

Authors: Jeff Campbell

Speed Cleaning (3 page)

Chapter 3.
THE KITCHEN

Stock your carryall tray with the following items:

  1 can of powdered cleanser

  1 spray bottle of Blue Juice

  1 spray bottle of Red Juice

  1 white scrub pad/sponge combination (white pad)

  1 green scrub pad/sponge combination (green pad)

  1 pad of No. 000 steel wool

  1 feather duster

  1 whisk broom

  1 oven cleaner

  1 pair of rubber gloves

  1 bottle of floor cleaner/polisher (or ammonia)

10 cleaning cloths (folded)

  3 terry cloth Sh-Mop covers

Stock your cleaning apron with:

  1 scraper

  1 toothbrush

  1 razor-blade holder with a sharp blade

  2 plastic bags (as liners) with clips

Hand-carry:

  1 Sh-Mop or your choice of mop

This chapter is designed to teach you how to clean any kitchen quickly, easily, and efficiently.

The Starting Point

Lean your Sh-Mop just inside the door. Put your carryall tray on the countertop just to the right of the sink. The strategy for cleaning this room is to work around the room clockwise, cleaning as you go—never backtracking, carrying all the tools and cleaners necessary in your apron.

This room is cleaned with lots of “pick up and replace” motions. For example, pick up your feather duster, use it, replace it; pick up the Red Juice, spray and wipe, replace it; pick up your toothbrush, etc. And when we say “spray and wipe,” we mean that you’ll be using a cleaning cloth and the Red or Blue Juice. These motions will become smooth and effortless with practice. We’ve picked your starting place for you: where you put your tray.

Getting Dressed

Tie your apron around your waist tightly. Check to be sure that the toothbrush and other tools are in their proper pockets. Hang the Blue and Red Juice by their handles on your apron loops on the appropriate side. By “appropriate” we mean that if you put the Blue Juice on the left side, then
always
put it on the left side. This is so you can quickly reach for your Red or Blue Juice without stopping to see which is which. It saves time. The tops of the spray bottles have an annoying tendency to come loose at the worst possible moments, spilling the contents everywhere. Avoid this potential catastrophe by automatically tightening the tops when you first pick them up. Stick your feather duster in your back pocket. Put a whisk broom in your other back pocket. Use it to brush dirt out of vents, corners, and away from walls and appliances that the vacuum doesn’t reach. Estimate the number of cleaning cloths you’ll need and transfer them from the tray to your apron. At first, just guess by grabbing eight to ten cloths; as time goes on, you’ll know how many you use. Finally check the illustration of you and your fully loaded apron. You’re ready to move on.

Setting Up

Put any trash containers just outside the door or in the doorway, making sure they are out of the way (as much as possible) of the person who will be vacuuming. (Follow these directions even if you’re working alone, since it is work you will do later and you want these items out of your way now.) Also, lay any throw rugs outside the door
flat
on the floor or carpet. That’s
flat:
F-L-A-T. Flat. No corners tucked underneath. No rumpled mess. You’re expecting the vacuumer to do the rug, so you’d better not make him or her stop to flatten it if you want to avoid a brawl in the hallway. Similarly, the person collecting the trash is not going to take the time to rummage around the kitchen on your behalf. That’s your job as the Kitchen Person. If you save someone else on the team a step, you’re saving yourself a step, and you’re all going to the movies that much sooner. That’s the idea.

Cupboards and Counters and Fingerprints

You are now going to start cleaning your way around our sample kitchen,
moving to the right, working from high to low
as you go. Above the counter are cupboards, and, since they are the highest, start with them. Usually all you have to clean are the fingerprints near the handles. Fingerprints need Red Juice, so grab your spray bottle from your apron loop and spray the prints lightly. Replace the spray bottle on your apron loop as you wipe the area dry with your other hand.

You will generally be using two cloths. Carry the drier cloth over your shoulder so it’s easy to reach. When that cloth gets too damp for streakless cleaning (chrome fixtures, glass, etc.) but is still usable for general wiping, keep it in the apron pocket between uses, and sling a new dry cloth from your apron supply over your shoulder.

Cleaning fingerprints is a task where we are careful to apply
Rule 4
: “If it isn’t dirty, don’t clean it.” If all you need to do is remove a fingerprint or two from an otherwise clean cabinet door, just spray the prints and wipe dry. Takes about five seconds. Don’t haphazardly spray a large area of the cabinet door (which takes longer) and then have to wipe this larger area dry (which takes longer still). You’ve forgotten that all you wanted was that fingerprint and now you’re cleaning the entire door. Stay focused on what you’re doing, which is only the five-second job of a quick spray-and-wipe of a few fingerprints.

The places that often
don’t
need cleaning are the vertical surfaces of the kitchen (the front of the cabinets, for example). The horizontal surfaces like the flat top of the counter will need cleaning every time. We have Newton to thank for this principle, plus his falling apple, gravity, and such. We are not proposing an excuse to be lazy or to skip things that need to be cleaned. Rather, the idea is to learn to be fast and efficient and aware of what you are doing. That includes
not
cleaning clean areas. After the fingerprints on the cabinet door, wipe the wall between the cabinets only if it has splatters. Otherwise it’s not dirty, so don’t clean it.

Spray and wipe the countertop area in front of you. (Pick up your carryall tray, spray and wipe the counter underneath it, and replace the tray.) Work from back to front, moving items to clean beneath and behind them. The “items” we’re talking about are the sugar, flour, and tea canisters, the toaster, the food processor, and so forth. The spice rack may get moved to dust
behind
it, but that’s all. Dealing with those individual containers is not light housecleaning, so just hit at the spice containers with your feather duster and save cleaning each spice bottle until some night you feel like doing it in front of the TV. Besides, the easiest way to clean a spice rack is to throw out all the old spices.

When moving items on the counter, move them straight forward just far enough for you to wipe the counter behind them. Before you move these items back into place, now is the time to dust or wipe them. Dust
them if that is all they need since that is the faster operation. Now move them back and continue on down to the drawers below.

Be sure to dust or wipe the tops of the drawer fronts as you come to them. Always check drawer handles and knobs for fingerprints (same rule as above, for cabinet doors).

The drawer knobs or the cabinet handles are often easier to clean by using your toothbrush in the tight areas rather than by trying to fit your cleaning cloth into a small or awkward place. The toothbrush is in your apron and is perfect for corners and other areas difficult to clean with a cloth alone. Use the toothbrush and your Red Juice, and then wipe dry. After you’ve cleaned them with the toothbrush, a quick wipe with a cloth will suffice for many future cleanings.

As you work your way around the kitchen, you will do a lot of spraying and wiping, spraying and wiping. Usually you can do this with the spray bottle in one hand and a cloth in the other.

When cloths get too wet or soiled, put them in the plastic-lined pocket. Or throw them to your tray if you’re a good shot. But be careful: Cloths soaked with Red Juice or almost any other cleaner may leave spots on the floor.

Get in the habit of always putting the spray bottles back in your apron loops,
not on the countertop.
We know it seems faster to leave them on the countertop, but it isn’t. This may seem awkward at first, but do it—it’s faster and it saves time.

Countertop Problems

So here you are, cleaning the counter with malice toward none and a song in your heart. Then you discover remnants of: (a) Saturday night’s failed soufflé, (b) Sunday morning’s blueberry pancake batter, and (c) other assorted stone artifacts that were once food. You are not amused. You took neither Chemistry nor Advanced Blasting Techniques in college. More to the point, you discover that when you spray and wipe these globs once, little or nothing happens. What to do?

First of all, when you come to a little nightmare on the countertop you have to resort to tools with greater cleaning power. Use your cleaning cloth most of the time since it normally will clean the countertop as it wipes up the Red Juice. When you encounter pockets of resistance like dried-on food, just move up to the tool of next magnitude—your white pad.

The white pad should be in your apron in a pocket lined with a plastic bag. When finished, always replace it in the same lined pocket. It doesn’t matter that it gets dirty and begs to be rinsed, because you use it just to loosen dirt and not to remove it. Unless you just can’t stand it anymore, don’t rinse it until you get to the sink. Do try to get used to its being full of gunk.

Spray with Red Juice and agitate with the white pad until a mess of Red Juice and reconstituted five-day-old vegetable soup appears. This is the mess you need to learn to “see through” (
Rule 5
). To do this you
have to learn how to tell how the counter feels when you’ve cleaned through the goop to the surface without rinsing or wiping to take a look. If you have difficulty judging when you have scrubbed down to the actual bare surface (without wiping), try spraying a little Red Juice on a clean counter area next to the dirty area you are cleaning. By first rubbing your white pad on the clean area and then the dirty area, you quickly learn to tell the difference by touch alone.

Another example of switching to a higher-horsepower tool is when you encounter food dried so hard that even a white pad takes forever to work. Let’s say drips of pancake batter have dried to malicious little bits of stone stuck to the counter. When you tried your white pad, you found that you were rubbing one micron or so off the top of the dried pancake batter every swipe. You were using up MGT—Movie Going Time—again. When you first encounter the problem, better to put your cloth away, grab your scraper, and scrape the batter loose in a second or two. Replace the scraper and continue along your way. Be careful not to scratch the surface: Spray the surface first and keep the blade at a low angle. Remember, increase the force or strength of the tool only as necessary (
Rule 7
).

Picture Glass, Window Glass, and Mirrors

You need your Blue Juice and a dry cloth to clean these items, and since you are carrying them with you in your apron, there is no need
to go back to the tray. To clean, spray lightly and evenly with Blue Juice and wipe with a dry cloth until the glass is dry. If you don’t wipe it completely dry, you will leave streaks—and if you don’t use a very dry cloth, you are wasting time since it will take you longer to wipe the glass dry. When we say spray lightly, we mean it. Glass or a mirror cleaned with a quick light spray of Blue Juice gets just as clean as a mirror drenched in it. It just takes two or three times longer if you overspray! So don’t. Replace the Blue Juice sprayer after each use—back where it was on your apron loop.

Cobwebs and Doors

As you continue around the kitchen moving to the right, working from high to low, look all the way to the ceiling each time you advance to check for cobwebs. Spiders like corners. When you see a cobweb, grab your feather duster from your back pocket, mow down the cobweb, replace the duster, and proceed. If you can’t reach the cobweb, use the detached vacuum wand as an extension for the feather duster.

You’re now ready to pass a doorway in our sample kitchen. Another place to check for cobwebs as you pass by is the top of the door frame. Did you also check for fingerprints where people (especially very little people) seem to grab the door frame as they pass through? Good.

Open Shelves

Next are some shelves used to store cookbooks, pots and pans, and other kitchen stuff. Hit at the leading edges of these shelves with your feather duster only. (An alternative method is to clean thoroughly
one
shelf each time you clean the kitchen.) To clean a shelf, move all items to the right side and clean the left side, then move everything to the left side and repeat. Finally, redistribute the items as they were. Or, if there are too many things on the shelf, move just enough items to the floor or counter so there is space to move the remaining items. When moving items to the floor or counter, move them the least distance possible.

Refrigerator—Outside

Wipe the top first. Once you are cleaning this room on a regular basis, you may be able just to feather-dust the top, which takes only a second or two. If the top of the refrigerator is used as a storage area, then just dust around all the items up there and treat it like the shelf we just described.

Clean the fingerprints from the outside of the fridge—and there are
always some! Don’t spray and wipe the entire refrigerator unless it needs it. Clean around the hinges and the nameplate of the refrigerator—your toothbrush is the best tool. Open the refrigerator door to wipe and clean the rubber gasket. If it is dirty, make sure to use your toothbrush here also. Once you get many areas like this clean, you won’t have to do them again for a long time: e.g., the refrigerator hinges, nameplate, rubber gasket, and cabinet and drawer handles.

Wipe the refrigerator air vent (down near the floor) while the door is open—or if it is just dusty, use your feather duster or whisk broom. While the door is open, wipe fingerprints on top and on the side of the door near the handle. Also, clean off the line left by the gasket on the inside door lining. Check for easy or obvious little wipes that are needed on the visible areas of the interior shelves. Don’t get carried away—it could take forever. (Instructions for a thorough cleaning of the inside of the refrigerator are in
Chapter 8
.)

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