 How do you clean a linen closet? And how often should you clean a linen closet? Great questions. We're going to talk about it today. Hi, there. I'm Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer. Now, today's show is brought to us by Housecall Pro, which is the number one service software for service professionals. And as a small business owner, you need help keeping track of all the details of every job. So if you are upselling, you need to know at what point on your calendar those upsells pop up, and it needs to be queued in so that you can bill your customers in advance and have the money waiting for you and have them on your schedule and have the person dispatched for that job. So check it out at HousecallPro.com forward slash Angela, and they'll walk you on a demo to see if it's right for you. All right, onto today's show. There's a woman that called in and wanted to know how often should we clean our linen closets and how do you do it? All right. So I'm going to show you three linen closets and we're going to go on a tour. We're going to clean out these linen closets. Now, I will share with you this. Linen closets are a great upsell. There are lots of small tasks inside a person's home that we upsell, which we charge more money for. It's on a special schedule and it is not part of a regular maintenance clean. It is not part of a deep clean, okay? It's not part of either one of those. And so we never go inside this closet except on an upsell. There are lots of little projects like that around a house and it's a way for a house cleaning company to generate more money. Now my first recommendation for cleaning out linen closets is that you book them on the walkthrough. So if you're on the walkthrough with the customer and you pass a linen closet, is this a bedroom? No, that's a linen closet. Oh, great. You mentioned and you just mentioned that a couple of times a year, I have cancellations. And so on a cancellation, if you like, I can put you on a wait list because we clean out linen closets on a random basis whenever we get a cancellation and I have a window I can't resell. Are you interested? And a lot of people are like, well, yeah, but you don't want inside my linen closet because we haven't opened it in five years. We just chuffed stuff in there and kind of like hope the door closes, right? So you're going to take everything out and that's a special project that requires special time and special pricing. You might even need special tools or special chemicals in order to clean out what's in there. So it's a special project. So today I'm going to take you on a tour. We're going to go through three linen closets and I'm going to show you exactly what the process is. I'm first going to tell you this. I'm going to pull everything out and we're going to sort it in categories. I'm going to take a quick picture of every category. I'm going to contact the homeowner because they're going to be gone while I'm doing this process and I'm going to do a quick text. Do you want this pile saved? Do you not want this pile saved? What do you want me to do with this stuff? Because there are decisions in there where some of this stuff has to go back in and some of it has to be tossed. So on the walkthrough, it might be possible that they say, oh, I'm really interested. Can we do that soon? If they say that, you're going to do the walkthrough for the closet right then. So you're going to open the closet door and say, tell me briefly about this closet. And then they will say, well, my daughter went off to school and it's been five years since she lived here and we just took all of her shampoos and soaps and everything and chunked them in the closet. So the stuff that's been in there is five or six years old. It's probably not good anymore. It's probably a no longer stable product. So with their permission right now, did you want to save this or do you want that to go? And they might say, no, get rid of all the shampoos and lotions and potions and all that stuff. Just get rid of that. But I do want to keep, I know that one of the closets that I'll be showing you today has some air filters in them. They're the air filters that go in the vents. And so that's where they store them. They just don't have a better place for them. And when we're done cleaning the closet, all of those will go back inside. That's perfectly fine. We just have to understand what the scope of the project is. So what we're going to be doing today is we're going to be figuring out what those shelves are used for. Is there anything in there that we can get rid of? And if not, we're going to fold everything up and organize it after we clean the inside of it and we vacuum it out, make sure there are no mice droppings or any of that stuff inside the closets. So let's go on a little tour and I'll show you three linen closets and how to clean them. This is inside a bathroom that is off the side of the daughter's bedroom and the daughter is now off to college. So we're looking at, it looks like toilet paper and paper towel storage. It's fine if they keep those here, I guess. We have some garbage bags or grocery bags or something there. We have other stuff that looks like medicine, lotions, Vaseline, light bulbs, towels, cloths, stuff. I'm not sure what this is down here. It looks like a container of, I don't know, shampoo, cleaners, something, we'll figure it out. And these are the vent replacements that she mentioned, the air filter replacements. And so she wants those to stay in the closet and we know that the light bulbs also stay in this closet. So when we're done, we will have organized this and created a more useful space honoring still the supply storage area that it has become. Now as I get close to this linen closet, we're going to take a look at what's inside. We have a whole bunch of what looks like cleaning cloths and towels and I'm going to say mismatched cloths and we have some magic erasers and we have a bunch of cleaning supplies and we have some what could be hair supplies. We have stuff down there, toilet paper and other cleaning supplies. This is in a hallway outside of a bedroom and it is a linen closet, I'm guessing because that was a good place to put the linens. As I look inside, the lighting is bad here, but I have some towels at the top that look like bath towels and I have what looks like bedding. I have a couple of boxes here, I'm not sure what that is. And we have some towels and then it looks like more bedding and then it looks like more bedding and more towels and an umbrella and some candy. Alright, so I'm going to just start emptying stuff out and I'm going to spread it on the floor and around here just so that I have a place to work. I'm going to start out, these are grocery bags, so we'll keep those all contained right there and I'm not going to take out all the toilet paper at the top because that's all that's up there is toilet paper and paper towels, but there are two shelves of paper towels, so I'm going to move all of the paper towels from the bottom shelf up to the top shelf so that there's room for the rest of the toilet paper. As we empty the closet, we're going to use the one touch method where you touch everything only one time if at all possible and then put them in stacks accordingly, whether it's trash or whether it needs to be saved and then make it easy for yourself so we're not picking up and putting stuff down multiple times. Alright, so our top shelf has our toilet paper and our paper towel rolls and that goes all the way to the very back, so I did not move all this stuff out of the top, I just organized it. On this shelf it's empty, the next shelf is empty, the third shelf is empty and the bottom of the floor is empty. This is a very small confined space, I'm going to put my shoe in here so that you can get a grasp of how big this space is. It's not very big at all and so what I'm going to do is clean those baseboards, clean the floor, I'm going to scrub out the grout with my grout brush and I'll clean the whole thing with a paper towel, I'm not even going to get a mop for this. Moving over here we have some stuff that I'm guessing has to go back, I have a sink full of garbage there, I have the grocery bags, I have some personal items of those personal items, I think the only thing I would keep probably is the Vaseline. There is a bottle of perfume there, I don't know what the shelf life on that is but we'll ask about that as well. I have some unopened bottles of mouthwash and I don't know what the shelf life on that is, I'll have to check but those are three or four other things that I would toss, I don't think they're any good and I have some cleaning suspect cleaning supplies that I'm going to recommend they also toss because I'm not sure what's in there and I don't believe that's the original contents. I have a toilet brush and a pumice stone so I'm going to take a quick picture of these and find out exactly what needs to be done with those. All right so you're right down here in the corner of this closet with me and I'm just going over this with a paper towel and I've just scrubbed the floor and I'm just going to wipe this out, it doesn't need to be a big process. See how gunky that is? I noticed that these are actually burned out light bulbs so we're going to throw them away. I'm going to save that but there's a pumice stone in here, I'm going to put that up here for now. I'm going to get rid of both of these, I don't think that's what's really inside there. These, I look at the date and I see that these are actually new so I'm going to hang on to these, she could have bought these just in the last couple weeks I guess so we'll put those back. She says if anything has been unopened, she'll take a look at the dates later so these two have been unopened and I'm just wiping them down so that they don't have dust on them, we'll put those back. That's pretty much empty, we'll throw that away. All right so here's our finished closet, I have the toilet paper and paper towels at the top. On the second shelf I have the grocery bags and the box of whatever she had here down below. I have just an empty shelf with nothing on it and on our next shelf I have the unopened bottles of mouthwash and her cleaning supplies which she did in fact want to keep inside this bathroom. I saw some in the other bathroom, I was trying to put them all together but she wanted them all here and at the bottom I have the vent filters that go there. So that is our closet number one and the customer will be so happy to see that there's just extra space available and that now they can put whatever they want inside that closet. What we got rid of is this is my garbage pile below here, we have to the right a whole bunch of bottles of old things. This is the stuff that was inside the sink, this is a broken scale as she said is 20 years old, it's okay to throw out and then the bottles that we emptied and so of all the things that we're keeping that don't go back in there it's going to be this little stack of whatever this is, they look like designer soaps, a thing of perfume that may or may not be any good and a couple of containers of I don't know peanut cups or something for a party so we'll give those back to the homeowner. Otherwise this is the stuff that I'm going to go get rid of right now, I'll throw those out in the family dumpster and then this closet will be done and we will move on to the next closet. Yay! All right I'm on to closet number two and as I look at these bottles that looks really old it's I don't know stained or whatever this this has been here for a very long time I don't know that this is any good I'm going to try to consolidate the stuff that's good and I'm going to just ask for permission that I can get rid of this. All right so I just pulled these out and I see on one of these containers it says pest control and so it is inside a container that does not match the contents that are inside so now I don't trust any of those containers I don't know what's inside any of those and they all look really old they all look like they've been I don't know left or mixed or used or whatever so I'm going to I'm going to ask permission to dump all of those. All right so for the top we still have some towels we have the cleaning towels we have other types of towels and hand towels we have narrowed it down to the cleaning chemicals that are good she said the mother no longer is using the gerry curl stuff so we got rid of all of that down here in the bottom we do have some hair and junk and garbage so like the other bathroom it's very small I'll put my shoe in there so that we can see how big that is it's a very small you know one and a half tile area so I'm going to wipe that out with a paper towel and then we'll go ahead and we'll put everything back. All right so our second closet ended up being the top shelf just towels the second shelf was just towels the third shelf was towels and cloths and then some toilet paper and then below that we had all of our cleaning supplies and more cleaning supplies that we were able to get up off the floor so that with this shelf here those will be able to breathe I feel better about that and then down here on the floor we just have our grocery sacks in a container so that those can be reused and so at a glance that is the next closet I'm really happy about the way that that turned out and so we will move on to closet number three all right all right so our last closet here it turns out that it's a camping closet so we were close when we thought it was an airbnb closet but the way that it ended up are towels on the top along with linens those are bedsheets and pillowcases on the next section we have mismatched bedding those are air mattresses that have never been used along with a couple of towels we have more towels and linens on the next shelf and then very below on the bottom we have some used air mattresses that are still in good shape and then the machines that I was thinking was a hairdryer was actually not an umbrella or a hairdryer but the machines to blow up the air mattresses so that is our project it is completely finished the things that we ended up taking out were onesies the instructions were to throw the onesies away if there was a pillowcase that had no matches or a towel that had no matches and then over here we have some mismatched hand towels that can be used for camping that will then just go in the washing machine all righty and that is the process of cleaning linen closets and my recommendation is that you do them at least one time and maybe two times a year in order to maintain them the first time it's going to be the hardest after that it's going to be a lesser maintenance clean okay so the first time it might take you a little bit longer the second time it's going to take you maybe half the time so my recommendation is that you do it twice a year put that on the schedule on an ongoing basis all right if you found this helpful give us a thumbs up let us know how we did or leave comments in the notes below and until we meet again leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it