5 Quick Tips In Cleaning Your Pinoy Home
A typical Pinoy home is usually clean, thanks to the help of a household helper or to the rigid and intensive cleaning done by the occupant. But how can you keep and maintain a clean home when you live alone? Or you happen to be the only responsible person residing in the house?
Well, you can binge watch “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” (Season 1 with 8 episodes) on Netflix, grab each item in your home and feel if it gives a spark of joy, OR, you can go ahead and follow these quick tips:
Need something cleaned?
ORGANIZE YOUR PAPER
Pinoys are keepers, we basically keep almost everything like old photos (albums of them), flyers, bills, food from last week, and most of all – Tissue paper. We love to save things, thanks to our ever prudent moms and grandmas, and keep them “for later” or “just in case”. But when they end up scattered all over the place, it becomes a mess.
Start by stacking up and wiping those photo albums, they are great memories after all. It’s really hard to throw some or all of them, and relatives will really feel bad if you’ve thrown a photo of them with you. So just make sure all your albums are stacked together, wiped clean and stored somewhere water cannot access it (a plastic box or on a row of shelves).
Throw away old flyers, bills from more than 12 months ago, and papers with zero sentimental or significant value for you. Preferably, shred your bills before throwing them to protect bits of your information that might cause identity theft.
Pinoys love to eat out, and chances are, they bring home doggie bags and tons of tissue paper from their fastfood restaurant or coffee shop. Store these old tissue paper in an empty tissue box or tissue dispenser so you can re-use them (which was your initial intention anyway, right?). This neat trick also gives us huge savings as we don’t need to buy tissue for a while.
BOTTLED UP
Another Pinoy thing is keeping condiments “for later” or “just in case”. Wash those empty mayo or peanut butter bottles or jars to help you organize condiments packets. If you think you only have a few, you could probably just put them all together in single jar, or you could separate them according to type.
If you have actually started recycling PET bottles and have a bunch in your sink cabinet, take frequent trips to the nearest recycling center or junk shop, or hand it over to a street sweeper who might benefit more with the extra change earned recycling them. Keeping those PET bottles for a long time might be more harmful to you than you think. Re-using them and subjecting them to heat might leech the chemicals in the container. Leaving them stagnant might make them breeding grounds for mosquitoes and germs.
DEDUST THE SAINTS
“No Tito, that’s not an old Counter Strike map version”. A typical Pinoy home will almost always have an altar, filled with images, statues, figurines, rosaries and religious items. In some households, the altar is only occasionally cleaned probably because, we only pray with it, or only a few in the household ever pay attention to it. Using a feather duster or a blower might do more damage than cleaning them, so a moist towel and a pail of clean water will be your best tool for this. Start from the front, where it is most likely always only cleaned, and then at the back. Rinse your moist towel after every wipe. Dusts leave stains when they are not removed immediately, causing discoloration or darkening on surrounding surfaces.APPLY SOME CHEMISTRY
Nobody loves scrubbing. Period. Be it scrubbing the floor, stainless utensil, the kitchen sink, bathroom tiles, and most of all – the toilet bowl. Well, we have good news! You don’t have to, well, at least not as vigorously as you need to. Hard to remove stains can be easily removed if you apply some heat or soak chemicals into it.
Vinegar and Baking powder mix is probably the most affordable and the most powerful cleaning agents you can use – as long as you soak them in it. Place a pinch of baking soda on stains and pour some vinegar in it. You can let it stay there for about 30 minutes and do other chores or you can watch the chemical reaction and pretend like you’re in an episode of MythBusters. Scrub a little and then rinse. You can substitute freshly squeezed calamansi juice so that it will leave a more pleasing smell after. This trick works best on bathroom tiles, toilet bowls, sinks, walls with molds and faucets with hard water stains.
HANGING THERE
The trouble with cleaning is, we sometimes only cleaning everything in eye-level. We tend to miss cleaning the wall or ceiling fan, wash the kulambo, dusting all the frames of the diplomas and family pictures hanged at the sala, wipe the Last Supper painting or statue by the dining wall, including the large spoon and fork hanging on the wall which you don’t exactly know why and what it was used for when you were a kid. BONUS TIP: Soak your Ice cream containers you use to store food (cooked or uncooked) in 1 part vinegar, 1 part dishwashing liquid and 8 parts water for an hour. This will remove all the grease, grime and nasty smell that remains there no matter how many times you wash them.
For you Sewing Box/Kit that is made of empty cookie tins, place buttons and loose items in small plastic containers so you don’t have to dig deep into the can just to find that small thing you’ve been looking for. Less hassle, less chances of getting pin pricked too!
And you can always call us to hire an assistant cleaner for a day! Click here to know more about our per hour cleaner or per hour assistant.