Posted by
ellie55
18 yrs ago
What does your helper use to clean your floor?With a mop or vacumn?or down to her knees using a cloth?I would like to know how does the general families 'cleanses' their home and 'detol-ises' their home enviromt ,making a cleaner place for your kids,see if there s any more improvement i can do in my part of the house.How often do you change your curtains,clean the toilet and how many times the floor is clean per day?
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Hi Ellie -
my helper vacuums the floor first (to get all the nice big crumbs) and then mops. (with a mop.) Korean style is to get down on all fours and really scrub the floor down of all the dust but since I don't want to do it that way, I don't feel that it's fair to ask my helper to do it either. The mop seems plenty good to me.
I'm opposed to over "sterilizing" or detollizing one's home - my helper mops with a light soap solution and that's it. No detol - specifically because the oversterilization of our enivornment is a possible cause of the "super bugs" that exist. Also - there has been significnat research into the idea that OVER cleanliness contributes to higher incidents of allergies. The LOWEST incidence of allergies are in the countryside. (I remember reading somewhere that in Mainland China somewhere allergies are the lowest.) The HIGHEST incidence of allergies is in some small town in New Zealand where the population immigrated rather recently into a civilized setting. Scientists have concluded that our overly clean society has something to do with the alarming rise in allergies.
That being said, i'm not recommending squirting chicken juice everywhere and cleaning everything with your shirt sleeve- but basic cleaning with soap and water is fine, and detollizing - only if someone is sick and you don't want to spread it to the rest of the family. (usually can't be helped though.)
Our toilet is cleaned 2X a week, Curtains twice a year, and the floor just once a day.
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Floors are vacumed everyday then mopped with floor cleaner with dettol added to it. Floors are mopped with a mopp with a disposable head which is replaced every couple of months. Use different mop head for indoors and outdoors. Toilets are cleaned once a day every day and a toilet detergent used as well as adding a bloo loo in the cistern. curtains drycleaned/washed twice a year. Best not to let people wear shoes in your house as dirty shoes a great way of spreading some nasty germs.
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I never clean the floor any more, but what I used to do was to put nice clean, white clothing on my baby and then let her scoot around the floor on her tummy. The dirt all goes on the clothing and leaves the floors spotless! ;-)
Actually, while I meant this as a joke, I'm somewhat serious. When my babies were small, I wanted them to be able to scoot around the house without coming up with a dirty tummy. Plus, you know how babies tend to eat whatever may be on the floor, so literally I wanted the floors clean enough to eat off of. So I would mop with cleaner and rinse, repeating the process over and over until the rinse water came out clean. If my baby ever came up off the floor with a dirty tummy after she had been crawling on it, then I thought it was time to mop again. Now that kids are much older, that's not such a concern and I don't eat off my floors. I still mop with some sort of strong cleaning agent and rinse, mop again and rinse again until the water comes up clean, but I don't feel the need to do it quite so often. Maybe every 3 days in the kitchen and 1 week in the rest of the house. Except actually, my ayi also runs over the house with a damp dust mop just about every day.
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Dettol - yuck - the smell is so strong it makes me sick. I only use Dettol on open wounds to clean it out - never on floors - the whole house smells disgusting - I had maid who decided that is what needed to be put on the floors (without asking) it took weeks for the smell to go. I have a strong sense of smell and I think babies do too - can't think of how awful it would be to smell dettol all the time at such a close range.
In most cases the chemicals you use on the floor are more harmful than any dirt and germs that mey be there. There are plenty of kids who live and survive in less than pristine conditions. I can't remember how much I cleaned the floors when my kids were little - probably completely about every 3 days - but spot cleaned as required.
As teenagers my kids are healthy - no allergies, excema, asthma and they don't get sick very often and then shake it off pretty fast.
I think we get so caught up in HK with the cleaning thing (because many have others to do it for us) especially with regards to getting the right chemicals for the right jobs. In many cases the DH feel that the more chemicals used the cleaner something is (since not have a DH my 'cleaning product' bill has reduced considerably....more cleaning or more chemicals used??) - reduce the chemicals where possible - esp on the floor if you have a baby crawling on it.
For natural cleaners see these pages
http://fengshui.about.com/cs/decorating/a/cleaning1.htm
http://eartheasy.com/live_nontoxic_solutions.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/8088/clngrn.html
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I would say on average that I use one large bottle of dettol a day just to clean the floor - what a fantastic smell! Funnily enough the babies just love it too! so do the cats, dogs and rabbits! Great stuff!
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cd
18 yrs ago
The bathrooms and toilets get cleaned twice a week, the floors get hoovered and mopped every day....apart from Sunday!
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Just out of interest how many of your kids have allergies?
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thanks first of all,the websites are interesting.and oh yes,i actually love the smell of detol altho it can be overwhelming,my husband hated it.:)
i mop and vacumn everyday,but im starting to wonder mopping the dirt from left to right n back again doesnt it actually draws back all the dirt.?but i guess you cant keep out dust and germs,even if you have all your windows all shut tight. someone just bought a hyla vavumn cleaner for hk 20000 plus.anyone uses it?they have free demo.
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cd
18 yrs ago
To Yaffle, I have 5 kids,none have allergies. One had many food intolerances when he was young, and we still don't give him cows milk to drink, but I think that has to do with his major disability than cleaning.
(if I didn't have a helper I'm pretty sure the floors wouldn't get cleaned every day). And they didn't get cleaned every day when the older ones were smaller and we were living in England without help.
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Hi Yaffle-
my older one (she's 2) doesnt' have allergies, didnt' suffer from eczema either... my newborn, she's only 3 months old and I don't think I can gauge it.
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To yaffle,
my children do not have allergies as well,both their skin complexion werent as perfect i would i like them to be as babies.but now at 3,eldest complexion is good.younger ones still have bits of dots and redness sometimes.dont think it has anything to do with allergies though.
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I hadn't thought about this before. My question is: what should I get my helper to put in the water to mop the floor if we don't like the smell of Dettol? What other products / brands are out there?
Do you think we could take the lid off our Milton spray and pour a bit of that in? What I want is something that disinfects - our new puppy wees on the floor and both my kiddies spend lots of time on the floor.
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We have a 3500sqft house and fully tiled 2500sqft garden and 8 dogs. A lot of our relatives do not like dogs so we try to make sure there are no doggy smells. Do not use dettol for the floor of the house as the smell is not good. Using the lid measure a couple of capfuls of dettol into a half bucket of water and just wipe over surfaces. Also the dettol is good for the bathrooms. We use green water and bleach and broom to clean the garden tiles daily and then rinse down with hose. We changed dog food once and our big dogs in the garden had a sick stomach in this case we used dettol as well because it takes away a lot of the smell. We have our cleaning products delivered in 20kg bottles as carrying it from Parknshop was too heavy and costly. Its commercial strength so lasts a lot longer. Might seem a bit much but we chose to have dogs but we don't want the smell to bother the neighbors.
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