The Rules of Speed Cleaning: Rule #5

Welcome back to our Speed Cleaning series! How's that refrigerator looking? Did you only clean the fingerprints, or did you accidentally end up cleaning the whole thing? It's okay if you did. Be encouraged! Your Speed Cleaning skills will be perfected over time. If you are just joining us in our Speed Cleaning series, welcome! You're not too late. Be sure to read over the previous rules before you move on to Rule #5.

Speed Cleaning Rule #5: Don’t rinse or wipe a surface before it’s clean.

You’ll just have to start over. In other words, when you’re cleaning a surface, don’t rinse or wipe just to see if you’re done. If you were wrong, you’ll have to start all over again. Learn to check as you’re cleaning by “seeing through” the gunk to the surface below. Then you can tell when it’s dislodged and ready to be wiped or rinsed…once! I ™ll give you an example. 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 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. 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. To do this you have to learn how to tell 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 in 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. Question of the week: What stone artifacts do you often find on your countertops?