Regular visits by one of the reputable house cleaning services such as Accent Maid Service, of course – thirty-three years in business and going strong - go a long way towards keeping your home in tip-top shape. But there are a variety of housekeeping activities that you can do in between our home cleaning visits to maintain your home and make the freshness of a cleaning last longer. I plan on touching on a variety of these things that you can do in future blog entries. For now, let’s address one of the easiest things that you can do: keep your air as clean as possible.
Let me first state that we do our best to clean all the dust out of your home without letting it get into your air each time we perform our housecleaning. Our vacuum sweepers are outfitted with beater bars for deep cleaning of carpeting and with hepa-filter bags to keep the dust out of the air. On bare floors we use a vacuum or dust mop followed up with wet mopping where appropriate to clean up all the dust. And we clean furniture with special micro-fiber cloths which are designed to capture dust, not just push it around. But, sadly, your home’s air will still have dust in it, no matter how hard we try. And it is all your fault. I will explain below. But first, how to keep down the dust the hard way.
CLEANING YOUR HOME’S AIR THE HARD WAY
When I was growing up, my mother kept our air pretty clean by having us vacuum, dust mop all the wooden and tile floors and shake out all the throw rugs – every day. Oh, yeah, and dust the furniture. But then our house was not large; it was … wait a minute let me search the internet for the home I grew up in … be right back … talk among yourselves … nine hundred and twenty-eight square feet. (It took me well under two minutes to get that information. The beneficial aspects of the internet continue to amaze me.) Anyway you see my point – the house didn’t take that long to do with two kids and my mom all working together. Especially since we kids weren’t allowed to go do anything else until the cleaning was done.
Well, I am pretty sure that you might find this a bit extreme – in retrospect I do and actually there is a word in German for what my mom was – a Putzteufel. Two words here – putzen meaning cleaning and teufel meaning devil. Not that I am complaining. But here is my point. All of this activity was really for only one reason – to get rid of the dust.
And it worked. If you get rid of dust by doing house cleaning every day, you therefore have less dust flying around that you then have to get rid of by cleaning – a virtuous cycle. But once again, who wants to do essentially non-stop house cleaning? Here is a picture of my mom, incidentally:
AIR CLEANING THE EASIER WAY
So other than dusting your house every day or having our maid service clean every day (hey, there’s an idea) what can you do? Turn on an air cleaner is what. I became interested in air cleaners a few years back when my wife began to suffer breathing problems inside our house. This problem seemed to come out of nowhere and was mysterious in origin. A little logic and a quick search of the internet led me to the conclusion that what we needed was air that was as clean as we could get it.
There were several parts to this particular aspect of home cleaning – keeping the air clean - and I will touch on all of them starting with this blog entry and continuing in others coming up in the future - to include the subjects of dust mites and humid basements and crawl spaces. I am not a construction engineer, pest control expert, architect or have any other kind of pertinent certificate or diploma but that which I will suggest in this blog entry and in future ones is based on my research, experience and, as I stated, common sense. Which is to say – it worked for us. Of course you have common sense but I suspect that you can benefit from hints and ideas gleaned from my experience and research. The combination of measures we ended up adopting to clean our air essentially eliminated the breathing problems that my wife was having. So that makes me a clean air expert at least as far as our house goes.
Also, please understand that I am primarily going to be addressing cleaning dust from the air. Other aspects of clean air or the lack thereof that can affect people are chemicals and tobacco smoke – some more than others. I will not be directly discussing those. People with acute chemical sensitivities can have major problems that should be addressed directly by skilled medical help, not by this maid service blog.
YOU CAN’T AVOID DUST
The dust that you, an air cleaner or our maid service gets rid of by cleaning is in fact pretty much you. Little pieces of you. Microscopic pieces of you. And the parts of the dust that is not you are from dust mites which live on – you guessed it – those same little pieces of you. Reliable sources (okay – the internet) tell me that each of us loses something like thirty thousand to forty thousand skin cells a minute. And that is without doing jumping jacks to shake even more loose. That amounts to, give or take, two million an hour and amounts to one and a half pounds a year of dead skin that you are spreading all over. Per person. No matter what you do. Well, actually your significant other that gained a little weight since you took up co-habitation is clearly producing more than when you first met, but then you might be also. I know I am. Talk about “for better or worse.” Maybe all of us should be nicknamed “Dusty.” A fun fact for cocktail party chatter: losing these skin cells is called desquamation. But enough dust hilarity.
Don’t rush off to apply skin lotion with a paint roller. It is all very natural and in fact necessary. If we didn’t constantly shed skin cells it wouldn’t be too long before colonies of bacteria, mold and what-have-you would begin to take your outer surface over and maybe turn you into an icky moveable feast. So it’s a good thing, health-wise.
It is also a good thing for the microscopic dust mites. At least from their point of view. (They might be small and not your kind of folks, but they do have a point of view.) Hopefully you won’t worry too much about the dust mites that are chomping away on the dead parts of you strewn about the house. Thousands, if not millions, live with us in our homes, no matter how clean we are. In fact, you produce enough dead skin in a day to feed a million dust mites. Which is to say, each person your household does. And your dog and your cat.
I am sure you have seen pictures of dust mites. If not, check them out on the internet. As unpleasant as they look, they are harmless. Unless you happen to be allergic to their poo which is also all around you. Which bring us back to cleaning up dust as best we can.
YOU CAN’T AVOID DUST GOING WHERE IT DARNED WELL PLEASES
Not only can’t you avoid dust but you can’t avoid it being in the air. No matter how still the air in your house seems to you, it is in constant motion, stirred up by even minor differences in temperature in various parts of the room and all over the house. And that is before the cat walks around to get a drink of water. When it is in the air it will settle again. Over and over. Some of it will adhere through electro-static attraction (so that is how the inside of windows get dirty!!), some of it will land on furniture and so on and it will take actual physical cleaning of surfaces to get rid of it. But some of it will swirl back up again and again.
So here is where the air cleaners come in.
OPEN THE WINDOWS AND AIR OUT THE HOUSE? MEH
But first, maybe a quick nod of the head towards airing out the house to clean the air would be in order here. Opening the windows might well eliminate some dust under the right circumstances. For example, immediately after a fresh snow fall or a rain shower the outside air is relatively clean. But then again, maybe not. I have been amazed when using a flashlight outside at night with how many particles are floating in supposedly clean, fresh air – even right after nature has been doing some housekeeping of its own with precipitation. Also, much of the dust in the air which is leaving your home during an airing is probably going to adhere to the screens anyway. An additional concern is that there seems to be pollen in the air through much of the three growing seasons, spring, summer and fall, coming from different plant species, which seem to take turns. This pollen can find its way inside when airing the house and can cause problems of its own in addition to being yet more dust. Of course once again, I am not considering the concern of cleaning the air of chemical vapors.
PORTABLE ELECTRIC AIR CLEANERS TO THE RESCUE
In the very next blog article I will give you some insight into which air cleaners – yes, more than one – we use. I came to the conclusion that a variety of smaller ones along with one strategically placed good-sized air cleaner were what we needed. And I believe that I found ones that are pretty cost-effective. I can tell you right now that we did not go top-of-the-line. Such air cleaners can cost pretty close to one thousand dollars. Actually, all of ours -six of them - together probably cost close to a thousand dollars, come to think of it, but they are doing the trick. And they will last for years. In the mean-time we have very clean air. How do I know? I know because we have very little dust floating about in the shafts of sunlight that shine through the windows and the furniture stays relatively clean for a relatively long time. More about those air cleaners in the next blog.
In the meantime, go change your furnace filters. Immediately. I will bet any amount of money that the vast majority of people reading this blog have furnace filters that need changing and need it badly. Don’t go cheap here, either. A good furnace filter will clean your air whenever the furnace runs. A crummy one will do very little good. A good filter will cost more but it will be worth it. A clean filter will not only help in your house cleaning but also allow your furnace to run less, saving your utility costs.
Here’s another idea. Purchase or make a garment such as this. I don’t see why it couldn’t be in adult sizes and used as part of an exercise program. Contact me if you want to go onto that Shark Tank TV program to see if we can get funding. You have to wear the garment, though. I will do the smiling, talking and maybe push you around with a stick.
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