How To Deep Down Clean Your House

How to keep your house deep down clean year round—without a live-in maid.

CLEAN SMARTER | Have you ever noticed there are two kinds of house dirty? The first is surface dirty. This is what most of us deal with on a weekly basis, doing the dusting, vacuuming and general tidying that keep our homes looking presentable.

The second is deep down dirty. This kind of dirty creeps up on you while you’re religiously attending to the surfaces. Deep down dirty is the leather sofa that never gets conditioned, or the back of the insides of bottom kitchen cupboards that become magnets for grunge, or the dust and gunk that gathers on baseboards behind bedroom dressers that seldom if ever get moved.

Deep down dirty can make even a tidy house feel unclean.

How to Get Your Home Deep Down Clean

To get deep down dirty under control, here is my new plan of attack. I will continue with my weekly fluff, brush and swish, and to that I will add the deep down cleaning of just one room in my house. If I’m already feeling overworked or maybe a little lazy I’ll do my deep down routine every two weeks.

To get started, I will be as meticulous as a surgeon in making a detailed list of absolutely every chore required to make the room I plan to clean feel hospital fresh. To ensure success, I will do absolutely everything on the list, no matter what it is, because only by doing everything will this attack plan be effective.

Actually, I began cleaning this way over the holidays and it worked amazingly well. Now I’m on my way to building a thorough chore list for every room in my house, a list I can use to divvy up the work with my always-keen-to-clean family members (yeah, right—maybe in my next life). /C. Rule