Chances are if you own a home you probably have done dishes and laundry. What about the places that you forget to clean. Say your boss is coming over for dinner. It doesn’t happen as often as it did in black and white television shows, but chances are there will be someone in your house that you will want to clean up for in the future. Maybe your mother in law is coming over. Maybe you have just put your house on the market for sale by owner.
Whatever the reason may be, I can almost guarantee there are places in your home, which people can see, that you haven’t thought to clean.
Your guests may even be able to see things you can’t if they are a different height than you. A taller person can see the top of the refrigerator better than you can, and a person who bends down may be able to see under your table or counter tops.
Having done some time as a cleaning lady during my college years, I have figuratively seen it all. I have cleaned apartments where tenants had let their birds fly everywhere with disregard for their droppings. I have seen near spotless homes where I was pretty sure they either didn’t live there, or they cleaned before I came.
Here are ten places you might want to check before you have company.
1. Check your light fixtures for dust. It might be worth climbing up on the sink in bathroom to run a wet rag over dusty places, but don’t touch the light bulbs. Wet bulbs crack and go out.
2. Check the top of hanging picture frames and the thermostat. These are easy to clean and make a big difference when presentation counts.
3. Do you have a book shelf or movie shelf? You probably don’t need to go through and categorize them, but making sure they are neat and tidy projects a good image. Being a pretty clean person, my DVD shelf has no DVDs on their sides and is dusted. Also, I don’t mix DVDs, VHSs, Blue-rays, and books on the same shelf.
4. Do you have a collection of figurines, beer steins, shot glasses, glass birds, or something similar? I often wonder when I see people that collect figurines and dust. How do they love birds so much that they collect statues of them but don’t take care of the statues?
5. Look out your window quick. Do you see lawn furniture? Is it stacked neatly during the winter and set out during the summer? Or has it blown over and cluttered your yard? If you don’t like to landscape, that is fine. All it takes to show people you take pride in your home from the outside is making sure any lawn furniture is in the right place and there is no garbage in your lawn. Worry about growing the grass back in high traffic areas when you have more time.
6. Do you cook many family meals at home or have children? If you do you might run a wet sponge over the front of your cabinets to collect any spilled grape juice or spaghetti sauce that bubbled up. Especially look around the handles of your cabinet and refrigerator. People can forget they have dirty hands and grab handles.
7. Another place you might consider cleaning is behind your sink faucets. It’s hard to get back there especially if there is just a fingers’ space from the counter top. Try wetting a cloth and pushing it behind your sinks with a tooth brush handle. It might need more elbow grease than that if you haven’t cleaned back there in a long time, but this is at least a start.
8. Having been guilty of this myself and having seen other cleaning ladies forget it, it is important to mention. It is less obvious when furnace ducts are dirty, but some people will notice if your vent covers are white and the gunk coming out of them is brown. Just take a clean broom or cleaning brush and gently scrape the outside of the vent. This should do for the time being, until you get up the courage to take the vent off and soak it.
9. The entry-way to your home is where guests take their first impression of the inside of the house. It is often a place where people track in dirt from the outside as well. If you have tile in your entry-way, try going over it with a wet rag. Carpet can be vacuumed.
10. The last thing you clean when you are getting ready for company is yourself. This is not so much a reminder to make yourself presentable as it is a reminder to make sure that you don’t go put on your nice evening clothes and then scrape brown gunk from your vents down on yourself.
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