We all spend so much time cleaning that we don’t often take the time to think about the topic of “cleaning” itself. It’s so obvious that home maintenance has to be done and so time-consuming. It is constantly in our daily routines that we don’t give it much thought. But here in rainy Washington, we spend a lot of time indoors, and a clean interior environment is decisive to us.

Looking at home cleaning in a new way, from a new angle might give us some insights about how to do it better, faster, easier, and more efficiently. That would help a lot! Especially if it saves us time. We’ve collected some cleaning information for home maintenance that we thought you’d find interesting and useful.

6 Cleaning Tips for Home Maintenance

• A man may spend almost 6,500 hours of his life with home maintenance. While a woman averages over 12,900 hours of her entire lifetime cleaning up after herself and others. That’s more than double the amount a man spends. Who wouldn’t want all that time back in their lives?

• 70%-80% of common house dust is made up of dead skin flakes. The rest is made up of everything from plant pollen, material fibers, animal and human hair, and minerals from the topsoil. It also has burnt meteorite particles from the atmosphere and volcanic ash and tiny cooled lava shards.

• 10 square feet of carpeting can hold over 2 pounds of dirt. The fibers of carpeting are dirt magnets, and foot traffic scrapes mud, soil and other debris off of walkers’ shoes and into the air pockets of the thousands of threads in the material.

• Most bed mattresses contain between 100,000 and 10 million dust mites. Even such authority as the Wall Street Journal reported that the weight of your mattress could double every ten years. It's due to the dust mites and other dust and debris that accumulates in your bed; this statistic isn't proven.

• Using the wrong cleaning products can decrease the air quality in your home by as much as 500%. This happens as compared to outdoor levels. The use of completely non-toxic cleaners is not always possible, so proper ventilation is needed. You shouldn’t store commercial products that contain toxic or irritating chemicals in your home. Let the professionals take care of that.

• Your kitchen sink contains — think of this — more germs than your bathroom toilet. Thoroughly clean the kitchen sink with soap on a regular basis. Germs like the food on your plate, just as you do. The moist kitchen sink is a perfect breeding ground for E. coli. You should also replace (wash) your dishcloth every week and put your sponges in the dishwasher. You can also put the sponges in the microwave for 30 seconds to kill off harmful germs.

Call Us

Well, with this information you can keep track of the time spent cleaning all the dirt, the dust, the air quality and the germs in your life. Or call Rain City Maids and let us worry about all of that for you. That’s our job. We’re here to help.