 Hey there, I am super excited that you guys joined me today. And I know that we are all getting ready for the holiday season. And so thank you so much for joining me on a special edition of how to clean up for the holidays. This is one of my very favorite topics and it happens every year because it is holidays and I know we have lots of family that come in and we have sometimes guests, sometimes friends. And this is a year unlike any other year because we've all gone through a global pandemic together and last year and the year before, many people did not meet for the holidays. Now this year, 2022, everybody's back to traveling again, there are big parties again, everybody's meeting. And it is a year where there's been a lot of people that haven't celebrated for the holidays. So in anticipation of that, there are two types of cleaning that we're gonna talk about today. The first one is the ability to have our house clean in preparation for the guests that are coming in. The second one is the cleaning that we're gonna do after the holidays have already happened and they've already not cleaning up and what have you. Okay, so the first thing that I wanna talk about and this is really important is this is a year when people ask us, can I help? The answer is yes. I know that if you're like me in the past, you're probably like, oh no, I got it, I can do this myself. But the reality is we want other people to help us this year. This is a year where people are looking for purpose and they're looking to feel needed and accepted and valued, if you will. So what we're gonna do in addition to celebrating the holiday is we are going to have stuff ready and this is all of our tools and our stuff in place so that when people say, can I help you, the answer is yes. Okay, so the first thing that we're gonna do is we are gonna get some latex or nitrile gloves and we will talk about this in a little bit but this is one of the items that we wanna have on hand. And the reason that we do is because if people are helping us clean, we wanna make sure that they are protected as well. Another thing that I recommend at the top of our show here is that you get an apron and these aprons are, they're waterproof, they are easy to wear, they're easy to wash. They have adjustable straps so that they go on really easy depending on how much space you need. And then also it's gonna keep somebody's clothes clean. So if you have guests that show up for your Thanksgiving meal and they wanna help in addition to working in the kitchen or cleaning up around the house or whatever, it's not gonna ruin their beautiful clothing by having lots of aprons. So I've got some links here for the products that I wanna discuss today but the first two leading into this is have the proper tools in place and then have your equipment in place so that it's easy when someone says, can I help you, the answer is yes. Okay, very cool, I'm super excited about that. I've got a couple of prepared clips that I would love for us to be able to discuss and so I have, it's hard to show you cleaning if I'm standing here in front of the camera. So I wanna show a couple of these prerecorded clips and I'm gonna answer your questions as we go. I'm also in the sidebar so that if you have questions, add a cue to the top of those and that way as I scroll through, I'll be able to pick them out really quickly and I can get them answered for you. So this is our first one and this is an easy to use vacuum and I want us to have something that's on hand that's easy to use, that's lightweight because if you're like me, my mother's coming for Thanksgiving this year and she's had a shoulder replacement and so her arm is not as able to move around as say my arm and so this is a lightweight vacuum, it's super easy for her to use and if she were to say, hey, and I know she will, hey, can I help you clean up for the holidays? The answer is, oh yes, I've got this lovely little vacuum here that would be easy for her to use. So here's a quick video on that and then I'll answer your questions. Did I ever tell you about the Eureka Stylus lightweight cordless stick vacuum? This is it, I call it the hypnotic vacuum and I say that because you will get hypnotized by using it and once you start using it, you will not be able to stop. You will want to vacuum everything in sight because it's so fun, I know, super cool. Right, so this is it. It's a very small vacuum at six and a half pounds and this is the handheld piece although it does have an extender piece that goes on it and then of course there is a vacuum head so that you can vacuum the floor part of your floor. The thing that's super cool about it though is it's cordless. So instead of bringing out the vacuum and undoing the cord and then trying to watch the cord as you go around the entire house, this is the cord, this is it. This is the cord, it plugs in and it charges. Once it's charged, you can go anywhere you want in the house. All right, so this has just a small piece attached to the top and this is a brush and with this brush attachment, you can use one hand and you can go in all the corners of the stairs in your home. It's also great for turning it over and going underneath the lip of the stairs where cobwebs seem to hide. It's really great with the extender pole to go around the corners of table legs and chairs and coat racks and around, let's say pillars or vases or things that are in your house that are hard to clean around where you can't get a regular vacuum. So this is a really great tool for that. You'll also find yourself using this for areas that are not so safe. So let's say that you're a senior in your master bath and it has one of those great big garden tubs and you wanna get to the other side of the tub to clean the areas around it what you're afraid of falling in and you can't climb up any longer on the ledge. This is perfect for that. With the extender pole, you can reach in all the hard to reach areas while you're standing on the ground. It's also great with the extender piece to go up and to get some cobwebs that are on a one-story room or to get the tops of six panel doors or the tops of door frames because with one hand and you can always use your other hand to support it, you can reach up high where normally you would not be able to reach. It's also really great with the extender pole if you wanna get the dust that's on the top of the vanity lights in the bathroom, this will allow you to do that very carefully. And I do recommend if you're using this near lights that you do hold it with a second hand just for extra stability. That way it's not gonna fall or knock and bang and break the lights. So you just wanna be very careful but it will reach lots of fun areas that normally you can't reach. With this attachment and the brush, this is also a really great unit for cloth items. So for cloth items, I say things like lampshades where you can hold one edge of the lampshade and you can use this to vacuum all the dust that has collected on the top of the lampshade. It's also great for areas like the top of a bed where you can't really get back there and get all the dust that's off the top. This will just let you vacuum the top of that in one fell swoop. Okay, so another thing that this is really great for is if you have let's say cloth shower curtains or tapestries where dust has settled on them and you can't really take them down to wash them very frequently because they need to be dry cleaned or treated with special care. When this is clean, you can just rinse it out in the sink. When this is clean, you can vacuum those tapestries and it will vacuum all the dust off. So this is kind of a multi-unit with lots and lots of different uses. One of the funnest uses for me is inside the car where you just take the handheld part here and you can go around the seats and around the dashboard, the dash console, inside the areas where the cup holders are or inside the console. You can put the crevice tool on and go around the seats where French fries and treats have dropped underneath the seat. You can get it out with this handheld vacuum. One of the things that's cool about the vacuum I want you to be aware of is that with one click it opens the canister and you can dump it out and empty it after every use. Now this canister is small. It holds about a quart of stuff but you will find that you will fill it up really quickly because like I said, once you start using it you don't want to stop. So if you are the age of about 13 and above, this is not for children, small children, but if you're like a teenager I recommend your parents get you one and leave it in your room. That way you can clean your own room every single day and it's small enough that you can use it and it's easy enough that anyone can use it. And then if you take care of it and it is your own vacuum, when you go off to college it will still be a great vacuum that you can use then to clean your dorm. So this can be a vacuum that follows you through the rest of your teenage years. I know, I know it's super exciting. I don't mean to get excited about it, but I am. If you are a homeowner and you have a really big house this is probably the vacuum you're gonna want but you're gonna want two of them and you're gonna want one in the kitchen and one in the master bath. And the reason I say that is because in the kitchen between every meal there are crumbs and little bits of things that have dropped on the floor. And so this gives you the chance to vacuum the entire area or just vacuum little bits of it with just the handheld part. Now I didn't share this with you yet but I would like to. The top of the vacuum itself which is the part that goes along the floor has headlights on it. And so this is really cool because if you're not, the lighting is not great or if it's like near the evening and it's starting to get dark the lights will shine and it shows all the crumbs and all the things that have dropped so that you can get a better clean. So that's really cool. There is a button here which connects the top from the stick. And so the thing that's cool about this is while you're using the vacuum you can just put your foot on this one pedal and it disconnects the stick from the unit itself. It allows you then while you're still vacuuming and you have the handheld piece in your hand without ever bending over to go along underneath the cupboards to go in the corners of the room and all the hard to reach areas. And then you come back and you find the head of the vacuum again without ever bending over you reconnect it and it because it just snaps in now you can keep vacuuming your floor without ever bending over. So it's a really fun vacuum. Like I say, it's lightweight. It's easy to use. The Eureka company has been around for 111 years. They know exactly what they're doing and they have the Eureka promise which is this is the best vacuum for its price for what it does in its class. So this is a really fun vacuum and I recommend that you take a look at it if you haven't. I know lots of people asked me on a regular basis what do you use? And if you have a condo or an apartment or if you have just like a small place that is one or two bedrooms this is a perfect vacuum for you. And if you have a bigger home you're gonna want two of them one upstairs and one downstairs one in the master bath and one in the kitchen. All right, so I have this in my hand and I didn't tell you this but I will tell you now because I know you're dying to find out this is exactly the size of a stair. And so if you're vacuuming your stairs it's very hard to find a vacuum where the cord is long enough to reach up the stairwell so that you can actually vacuum your stairs. The cordless vacuum is the way to go. And I say that because this is the width of a stair you just lift it up on the stair turn it sideways and then vacuum your stairs as you go. So stair cleaning just got easy. All right, one other thing that I wanna suggest is this is my go-to vacuum for the morning. And I say the morning because every morning I have this little routine that I do and the routine is I fix the breakfast and I get everybody off for the day and then I vacuum up all of the crumbs and these are crumbs that came from the toaster they're crumbs that came off the countertop and in a perfect world, of course there would be no crumbs but there are crumbs and it's really nice when you have the ability to sweep stuff off on the floor and then just scoop it up. So with that vacuum I can unhook the head of the vacuum and I can just take the hose or the long stick part and I can go underneath all the cabinets and then I'm good to go, right? It cleans up everything really, really nicely. So it is part of my morning routine every single day and then because it's cordless I'm not unplugging it and plugging it back in but I can run all over the entire house. Now this is what I recommend for Thanksgiving because we are in a hurry and as we're in a hurry sometimes we drop stuff sometimes family tracks stuff in and then there are like globs of dirt and stuff on the floor and then you're like, I just vacuumed like what is going on? And then you gotta pull out the vacuum and plug it in and all that stuff. So having a really nice lightweight cordless vacuum is an awesome addition to every home and because it is lightweight like I said, anybody can use it but it's really great for those quick picker uppers and like I say, because of the stick part that connects to just the handheld part which is this handheld part right here what that does is that allows you to race around the house like I'm sure we've all done those mad dash cleanings we're like, oh no they're gonna be here in 15 minutes and so then you just vacuum up everything that you can see that's in the line of sight that has dropped on the floor has fallen or has been tracked in or whatever. So it's a really great quick picker upper unit and like I said, it's part of every single day and so it's just part of my morning routine but I do recommend having one in the bathroom as well because it's great if you have like hairs that have dropped out on the floor or if you just wanna use the handheld part like scoop up whiskers or whatever have fallen in the sink it's awesome for that. All right, so one more quick recording here that I do wanna recommend because once we vacuum, that's only part of the job, right? We still have to mop. Oh no, mopping, who loves mopping? Mopping is also part of our daily activities and if you're like me there's probably a section right in front of your kitchen sink, your stove and your refrigerator they get the most traffic in your kitchen. I know that's true for our home where people especially since we have employees that come to the house they'll be heating up their lunch and stuff and so like the microwave, the kitchen sink, the refrigerator, that area gets a lot of traffic and so every day I do do a quick mop but just like you, I don't like pulling out a whole mop bucket and a mop and running the water and then you have mop bucket water and all that stuff, right? So here's my quick, fast, easy solution that is not only great for the Thanksgiving but it's also a great Christmas gift if you or someone you know is in need of a really great all-purpose tool. So check this one out. Are you one of those people who suffers from allergies triggered by cleaning chemicals? If you are, you're not alone but you're gonna love the light and easy steam mop which works off of no chemicals whatsoever. This is super exciting and we know that by using a steamer we can come 99.9% of bacteria on hard surfaces with just steam alone. So come to the rescue, the light and easy steam mop. Now when I get done showing you all the different ways you can use it you're gonna go, I gotta get me one of those. Now one of the things that I wanna tell you it's kind of a little secret. It's not just a steam mop. If I take this apart and this just comes undone it becomes a steamer by itself. And you'll see on my table I have a whole bunch of different attachments that go with this and I'll show you how to use those. But there's a plug in here and this plug plugs right into here. By itself it's a steamer. When I plug it into here it becomes a steam mop. Now if I don't plug it in I can use this part as just a regular mop for dry mopping and wet mopping floors. So now you have a multi-purpose tool that you can use for lots and lots of clean, okay? Now one of the first things that I do when I get a new tool is I like to lay all of the equipment out and get a really good grasp on what came in the box and how to use it. Now it's really tempting just to plug something in and just start using it without being really aware of everything that you have. So I recommend it as a very first step that you read the Quick Start Guide. This one is 11 pages and it's very comprehensive but it will show you every piece of equipment that comes with your unit as well as all of the safety instructions here in the front. If you go to the book itself it shows you different ways to use it and things you might use it on, things you need to be aware of and at the back there's a troubleshooting guide. So before you return it if you think something's wrong check the troubleshooting guide because most of the questions that you have will be answered right here. There is also a one year limited warranty at the back and if you have any questions or you need replacement parts or you need extra microfiber mop pads all that information is in the guide. So save the guide because that is your Bible on how to make this work. All right, I'm gonna share with you how I use this so that it makes a little bit more sense on what you're seeing here. These tags did not come with the unit. I put these on myself. I just got a roll of painter's tape. This is not included in the kit. I do this separate just to keep myself on track. A magic marker, a roll of painter's tape. I cut little strips and I say this is for the barbecue grill. Now this particular attachment has muddle bristles on it. If I use this on anything but a barbecue grill it's going to scratch. So I want myself and my family to know at a glance that is what this is for. Now I love the painter's tape for this reason. It peels off really easy. Should I ever decide to peel this off? It just peels off. It leaves no sticky residue whatsoever. The other thing I really like about this and all of these pieces, all of these attachment pieces are space age, heavy duty resin with heavy duty bristles. So all of these are dishwasher's sake. Let's talk for a second about the handle. If I turn the unit to the side there's a button on the side and if I press that button in the handle separates from the unit itself. This allows me, there's a little handle here. This allows me to carry the units to and from a job without carrying it with a great big handle because then I run the risk of bending or breaking the handle. But this allows me to transport it easily. And then when I get there there's a little end and a big end. And it just slides right in place. When you hear it snap you know that your unit is connected properly. Now on this handle, and I'll show you this there's a little bucket. And that little bucket holds this hose. So you'll see that I've got a couple of connectors here. The slides in just like that that also connects in place. When your unit is put together the big end of the hose threads through the handle and it stores just like that on top of your unit so that you have your unit at a glance. All right, so I just wanted to answer a couple of questions that came in just a second ago. Somebody said, I didn't know and it was Bernice Maria. So thank you so much for joining us today. She said, I didn't know that you could use this on the hardwood floor. And many people didn't know you could use it as a wet mop, as a dry mop and as a steam mop. And so I wanna go into some of the reasons and some of the ways that we use it as it for other purposes. But yeah, there are three different ways you can use this unit which is one of the reasons that I'm so insistent on using it because it is one of the quick picker uppers that I use for every single morning with that area in front of the stove, the kitchen sink and the refrigerator. So it does get a lot of traffic and because there's so much, I don't know, traffic and spilled food and spilled coffee and stuff like that. I literally have to mop every single day. So this is a really great way to do that without, I don't know pulling out the mop and making it a great big production, right? In order to use the mop as a mop by itself, the first thing we're gonna do is disconnect the cord from the handle. That's this little clip up here at the top. Then we're gonna leave this to the side. We're gonna turn this steam mop to the back. This handle on the top, we're gonna pull out and turn all the way around. And that's gonna make it easy just to pop this cord off. Now I have the cord and it's disconnected from the unit itself, which just leaves the unit to be a freestanding unit. But now my cord is loose. So I've saved the twisty tie, which is a Velcro tie here. I'm gonna twist that right around the cord itself. And that way I have my cord all in one place. Now I can disconnect my power, which is the steamer itself. That can be used separately. And now I can use the mop just as a mop. In order to use this as a mop, I can use it one of three ways. I can use it as a dry dust mop, as a damp wet mop, or as a steam mop. Now for luxury vinyl plank flooring and hardwood flooring, just for quick pickups around the house, I would probably use it as a dry dust mop. So the cool part about this is it's super lightweight and it's easy to use just for quick jobs. It disconnects the power source from it so there's no power and there's no steam. I take the mop itself and this has a swivel head. It swivels in all directions. So it makes it easy to do your great big S patterns across the floor. It also lays pretty flat. So it goes right underneath furniture and around table legs and all kinds of hard to reach places. Now the mop itself has six different pieces of Velcro on the bottom. And so in order to connect this, I have a microfiber mop pad. This is the same mop pad that I'm gonna use for all the different types of mopping. This is reusable and machine washable. So in order to connect it, I put it on a flat surface. I take my mop, I stick it on and now I'm good to go. Now, the cool part about this is the mop pad, because it is microfiber, it holds seven times its weight in water. So if I wanna use this as a damp mop, I simply take the microfiber cloth, not the one I just used for dusting because it would be dirty, a clean one. And in the bathroom or the kitchen sink, I run it under cold water and now it is wet and I squeeze it out so there's no extra water. I do the exact same process where I put it down on a flat surface and then I put my mop on top of it and Velcro it to the bottom. Now, we gotta talk about the Velcro for a second. Because all of the mop pads are picked up by Velcro, I gotta protect the Velcro on the bottom. If you're storing the mop itself and you put it on a carpet, it's gonna Velcro itself to the carpet. And when you go to pull it up, you're gonna get all kinds of little itty bitty things inside your Velcro. And then when you go to put it on the mop head, it's not gonna stick. So sold separately, this is completely separate, but I use a cutting board. This is just an inexpensive cutting board that will go from room to room, depending on where I am, so that I can store it on a cutting board, which is a flat surface and it protects the Velcro so that next time I'm ready to use it for my mop pads, it still sticks. All right, one note about the microfiber mop pads. These will pick up lint as well. And we wanna protect our microfiber mop pads so they do an effective job. So when I use these in the washing machine, and I'm gonna wash them, I wanna put them inside a mesh bag. And this is a mesh bag with a zipper. Water can get through this really nicely so I can just put inside my microfiber mop pads. Those go inside the washing machine. When they come out, I can just let these air dry and they will be good to go again. A secret about the mesh bags. It comes in a kit, there are a few of them. You can take the attachments, which are a heavy duty resin. It's like a space age resin, so they're dishwasher safe. I can put these all inside a mesh bag. They all fit inside here. I zip it up and then I can put this whole entire pack inside the dishwasher and it will wash them and it will clean them so that when I open them up again, they're all clean for the next use. All right, so this is interesting, but I have microfiber cloths in one and I've got different sizes. And I stopped for just a second to talk to you about the mesh bags. As a house cleaner, we have microfiber cloths and they also will pick up lint when they are washed in the washing machine with other stuff. So as you're going into the holiday season, it's gonna be easy to just wanna chunk everything in the laundry bin and then miraculously that it gets washed. And the secret is make sure that you have the mesh bags prepared in advance so that you have places to just pop them inside the bag. Now, one of the cool things about this is if you have like a soaking bucket that you use, I know that we soak a lot of our microfiber cloths because sometimes they're really nasty when we're done and we wanna soak them and clean them before we go to another customer's home. So what we do with these is we open up the top of the bag, put it inside a bucket of hot sudsy water and then we just pop them right inside the bag and then they are soaking inside the bag, inside the soapy water. Then when we get ready to do the laundry and this is probably crude, so forgive me for doing this, we just take the whole bucket and kinda go whoosh and put it inside the washing machine and all of the microfiber cloths, we wash them right directly inside of these bags and then these can come out and on low tumble dry they can be tossed right inside the dryer. So low tumble dry for the microfiber mop pads and the microfiber cloths because if you do it on a high heat it will ruin the fibers for the microfiber but these mesh bags are a dream and they come in different sizes in this pack. This is a really great big one and this is probably for if you have a lot of microfiber cloths, hopefully you don't have mop pads that will fill this up because otherwise then your floor is huge and so the smaller bags are great but these do come in four different sizes. So this is a smaller one and then the other ones that I just showed you are the smallest of the four. So it comes in four different sizes and I think in this pack there are like 10. So I just wanted to stop for a second and highlight that. Another thing that I wanted to highlight and that is while we're still talking about the steamer, couple of things, when you are done using the steamer you wanna empty it out and then you wanna leave the little door that goes here, you wanna leave that open so that it can air out and so that no bacteria or anything builds up inside the unit. So when you are letting it dry and it's just airing out, leave the door open. Another thing that I wanna recommend and this is for awesome Thanksgiving cleanup, this is prior to your Thanksgiving. If you have one of those great big freezers and I know a lot of people do that they're not self defrosting until the ice will build up and it gets really thick, you're gonna need all the space you can for holidays so that you can put extra pies and extra cooking and baking and leftovers and all that stuff inside. So with the steamer, this is the handheld steamer there are plenty of attachments and also the hose where you can get up right close you wanna unplug the freezer first and then you wanna get up close and personal and just steam that away. And then what happens is you get close to the coils cause you don't wanna put direct steam on the coils but you can put it directly on the ice and then as the chunks of ice start melting it'll come out in great big sheets and then you can take that and you can either put that, you know toss it out in the driveway or you can put it inside your flower beds or however it is you recycle that extra water that is found in your freezer. So there are different options there as well but the steamer, the handheld steamers become like my new favorite way to clean out those really horrific freezers that are just so hard to clean and they take 24 hours to defrost by the time you just let them air out and all that stuff. So the handheld steamer is Adrian. Anyway, I just wanted to highlight that as well. Unit is the handheld steamer and it has a plug right in here. This plug connects to this plug right here. And so if it's not connected all the way the power is not gonna get to the unit. So in order to connect it you put it inside the docking station and then with both hands, you squeeze it tight. Once you squeeze it like giving it a little hug then it connects the plug so that now the electricity goes all the way down to the base plate where you're gonna be steaming your floor. Now, this is perfect for ceramic tiles in bathrooms for example, where you have like hairspray and stuff that you've sprayed and it's fallen on the floor and there's icky sticky stuff in the bathroom. The steamer is perfect for that. If you have things like dog puke or spilled soup or other animal issues on your floor it's also great for steaming those areas as well. So I love this for this unit because as a mop it is fantastic using it dry, wet or with steam. One of the coolest things I love about the New Light and Easy Steam Mop is what I'm calling upright cutoff technology. What that is basically is if you have to leave for some reason you get called away on an emergency or if you just forget and you put your steamer in an upright position when you put it in an upright position the steam automatically cuts off. That's new with this model but it prevents your floor from getting discolored or from staining. You just put it in an upright position and the steam stops. Then when you're ready to start up again you put your foot on the face of the foot plate and you gently dip your handle back and the steam automatically starts up again. This lets you pick up right where you left off without ruining your floor. If we are gonna be using a handheld unit this goes to the cord and you'll see that the plug goes to this plug right here. Now it doesn't matter which way you plug this in you unplug it this way with the buttons and you can turn it around and also plug it in this way. So either way works. And once it's snapped in place it's gonna send the power to the other end of the hose and that's where we're gonna attach another piece and this works just like this. You'll see that those pieces fit once it's snapped in place you know that you have a connect seal. Now this is a fabric bonnet that goes over the top of this swivel head and this can be used for soap scum on shower doors. It can also be used for fabrics in upholstery or valances or fancy pillows or anything like that. So this is just using the handheld steamer and the steamer attachment. In order to use the steamer itself we need to add some water and we wanna make sure that before we do that the plug is unplugged so we don't have any electrical issues while we're filling it with water. This here is the plug that locks the water in the unit so it doesn't come out. There's a hole that goes down inside the unit and we have in order to fill it up what looks like a little gasoline can. Now two of these containers will fill up this unit full. So we're gonna use regular tap water. The cool part about this particular method of cleaning is that it's completely chemical free. If you have hard water we do recommend that you use distilled water but other than that all you need for this is just water. We request that you use no chemicals and no essential oils in this unit. It can clog the unit and make the unit stop working properly so we wanna just make sure nothing but water. Okay, so that now we have two of those containers. I'm gonna close the door and push the plug in place so it locks it in place. Now if I turn my unit around you can see the water fill line and when you start running out of water you can just look at the back of the unit through that clear door and it will tell you how much water is left. Now to go ahead and use it we're gonna plug in the plug and by plugging in the plug it's going to light the lights here and this gives us a low, a medium or a high and that way it takes about 30 seconds to heat up before you're able to use your steamer. If I hold the cutting board in front of this you can see how much steam gets on the front of it within just a second or two. Okay, so these cutting boards come in all different colors and if you followed me for a while you know that I use these for all kinds of cleaning and I know that this is not how they were designed. They were designed to cut like bread and toast and bagels and things. And I don't cook but I do clean and I use these for pretty much everything and I like to have them in different colors because we can assign them to different people on our team and we can also not cross contaminate from room to room if you like that as well. One of the things that I am really fond of when it comes to the cutting boards is they're really flexible, okay? So they bend, they move, they're very easy to carry with you but we do carry a mop bucket with us when we travel to people's houses and this just slides right inside the side of the mop bucket. So it adheres to the side and then it's not taking up any extra space. But when you get to a customer's house for example or if you're cleaning your own house this is probably true for this holiday season as you go to clean your baseboards. If you have to scrub your baseboards you don't want anything dripping on the floor and so you can just bunch this up right up against the side of the baseboard and if you're scrubbing and you have water or spray it's gonna spray, it's gonna hit the baseboard and it's not gonna hit your carpet or you can use it on the other side and you can spray this way so that it doesn't spray the wall. I know lots of people are afraid of using spray because of the over spray and so if you wanna be really savvy you can have two of these boards and just carry them with you but one on the floor up against and then hold the other one in place but I use these for a lot of things. They're also great for other things that we haven't discussed. For example, like if you were emptying an elder person's bedpan and it's one of those toilets that sit next to the bed sometimes the lid is on the toilet itself on the seat and so when you pull that toilet out you don't have a cover for it and so if you have this inside your cleaning bin you can just use that as a top, as a lid while you carry it to the restroom to empty it. So there are lots of uses that we use this for but I use it a lot in cleaning. Now if you're not using it for cleaning and you're just using it for the holiday it's really great either as a placemat it's also great to slide underneath your cookware. So for example, let's say that you have a toaster or you have a crock pot or you have a blender or anything like that. I use these all the time in my kitchen when I am in the kitchen because like I said, I don't cook so I'm kinda messy when I cook and then I don't wanna have to spend a lot of time cleaning up because my strategies are work quick and smart and don't make an extra mess that you don't have to unnecessarily, right? So one of the things that I'm really big on is if you're using a crock pot slide this right underneath it when you go to stir your goodness whatever it is that you're cooking and you take that spoon out what happens to it now. And so now you can just set it on the corner of the mat and you haven't made a mess all over your cabinet. So this is a quick easy holiday tip because as you're cooking, if you're like me oh, I've gotta cook this holiday, ah! Okay, so anyway, my family invited themselves over for Thanksgiving this year and I'm freaking out because I don't cook and I am gonna be cooking this year but I'm gonna be using all of these cutting boards underneath all of my different crock pots and my pans and the places that I'm cooking because they are really durable and they are dishwasher safe. So when you're done, it's got a whole bunch of ickty ick on it you take it, you just pop it right in the dishwasher and you're good to go, okay? So if you don't have some of these I swear you gotta get some. These are like I said, you'll use them for cleaning you'll use them for cooking and the ones that you use for cleaning don't use for cooking, leave the cleaning ones for cleaning so that you're not cross-contaminating them leave the ones that you have in the kitchen for the kitchen but I do have, I've got a whole drawer of these in my kitchen, every time I make sandwiches I just pull it out, it goes on the counter sandwich makings go on top of here when I'm done I do like this, I take all the crumbs and I go whoo right into the trash so that they don't go onto the floor this goes right inside the dishwasher, boom we're done but the cleanup is done, it's that easy. So if you don't have some of these you gotta get some. All right, next item, all right I'm super excited about this and I just love the fact that you guys have joined me here and thank you guys for your comments, this is so awesome we have lots of people that have asked questions already and I appreciate that. So thank you very much we're gonna answer more of those as soon as we get to the end there's one more thing I wanna show you about the steam mop and this is before we leave that topic because once we leave we're not coming back and you know what I'm doing to you, right? I'm gonna make you race around your house with a vacuum, you're gonna vacuum everything up and then you're gonna run around the house and you're gonna steam everything because you don't need a lot of cleaning chemicals to do that with the steam it's just 100% water again, no essential oils, no vinegar no nothing inside the unit itself it is just water, 99.9% of bacteria that you can remove just from steam and so it's a really great way leading up to the holidays especially if you have family coming in that have chemical sensitivities and you don't want them sneezing and wheezing and all that stuff because you tried to clean your house another reason that I'm really fond of this unit is because if somebody offers and volunteers to help you then you just give them your unit and you off they go, right? And they can just steam everything they wanna steam in your house and I would encourage them, hey, just steam away make yourself at home, have a good time. All right, here's my last using your steamer unsealed granite is perfectly okay it only takes a couple of seconds to dry you're going to great big Z pattern so that you don't miss anything and if you have kids that sit at a counter or a table and they've got greasy or jelly fingers underneath you can simply steam underneath there and the edges of the table with your steamer and that way you don't have to climb underneath the table so it makes your job super easy. So again, seal the granite is perfectly okay with a handheld steamer. All right, I did wanna answer this question do you use it for the showers and the answer is yes we do and I did not add the clip in of the showers but this comes with 25 different attachments and so with the attachments you can put it on and you can do all of the grout it's got a whole bunch of different grout attachments it's also great for removing pretty much anything that is inside your shower. So whether it is hair dye if you have hair dye and you're rinsing it out and get stuck on the sides of the walls or it is on the base plate of the shower I know sometimes it will discolor like the plate of the shower you can steam all of that off. Now it is fantastic for cleaning off all different kinds of like sunscreen oils and makeup from our foundation and stuff like that that gets stuck on the walls and it creates that greasy kind of ick in our showers. This is really great because you just steam the walls and off you go. Now I do have a true confession and I love using products in a way that works and not necessarily the way that they were designed and so in this particular clip that I just showed you you saw the hose on ahead and I was cleaning the shower scum off the shower door that is actually not a shower scum door cleaner that is actually a garment steamer. I know I tricked you right? That is designed for carpet. So if you are going to use it for carpet or you're going to use it for clothing or you're going to use it for fabric or drapes or tapestries or what have you I recommend that you get a couple of extra bonnets because the ones that you use for soap scum and you are not going to want to turn around then and use on a nice Sunday blouse for example or a men's dress shirt, right? You're going to want to keep your clothing garment steamer pads separate from the ones you use to clean with. Well, I can't tell you how many bonnets that I have and how much cleaning I use that garment steamer on. Here's the reason why I like the garment steamer. It's interesting, but this is the steamer itself and with most handheld steamers you're holding the whole steamer. I'm going to close that so it's not flapping around. You're using the whole steamer when you go to use it. So imagine that you were in a shower and you're trying to get up high on the wall to do like the grout part in a normal handheld steamer you'd have your arm up high and you'd have the steamer in your hand and all of a sudden you're trying to maneuver the cord and you're trying to keep your arm from getting fatigued while you're doing that really tedious type of work, right? So for this steamer and this has become my favorite steamer for this reason it's got the long hose with that garment attachment on it or also you can pop on the other attachments on the end of that. So just for steaming. And so now you're just wielding this little tiny hose which is not heavy at all and you're holding this in the other hand. So this is running all of the electricity and the steam and you're using the hose to clean the rest of the walls and to do all of the grout cleaning and all of that stuff with the hose. You're not doing this number all over the shower because your arm does get really tired after a minute, right? So this is the reason I love this unit. I have a true confession as well. When I'm done with a cleaning product, if I really like it a lot of my employees will have contests and they're like, I get it when you're done with it. And so then I will give them my units when I'm done. And I gave one of these away because I thought, okay, this is awesome but I already have a couple of steamers, I'm good to go. And then I missed this one so much that I had to go out and buy another one for myself. And so like this one is only mine I'm not sharing it with anyone, it's only mine. But if you do a lot of cleaning, this is a wonderful unit and I highly recommend it. And if the holidays are coming up and you haven't put something on your Santa list make a wish list for this because it's very affordable and it is something you will use every single day. I will tell you this and this is one parting thought on the steamer itself. I didn't think I was gonna love it when I got it because the pads Velcro on and the other steamers that I have have an elastic bonnet that goes around it and it locks up over the top of the steamer head over the faceplate. And so I was like, I'm not a real big fan of the Velcro and that it just snaps on there and then off you go because like what happens if it comes off while you're cleaning? So that was a problem for me. I had these resistance to that. And then one of the things that I discovered was I ended up loving it even more because it is so quick instead of stopping and then trying to like pull the elastic up over the head of it. When I'm in a hurry and I am every morning when I'm getting ready before my team arrives I'm sweeping and mopping and I'm doing the little routine that I just showed you with the vacuum and then the mop and then the steamer and it's so easy to just grab the steam mop and I don't use the steam every day. I just take the mop head I ring it out in the kitchen sink drop it on the floor, put the thing on, boom I mop and I mop that area in front of the dishwasher the sink, the stove, the fridge and the microwave and I sweep and mop my way out of the room. And then when I'm done I just pick off the end of that and that goes right inside. I've got a gallon jug that just has some oxy clean in it with a little bit of water in it and I just drop the mop head in there so that it can like soak and not be so nasty before it goes inside the washing machine. And so that's my process every single day but I love and I didn't think I would so I teach an old dog new tricks so I learned some new tricks and so the trick for me was I love that it snaps off so easy and it goes on so easy. So it's super fast, super quick and you can do it when you're in a huge hurry. Now, if you're like me leading up to Thanksgiving you're probably cleaning right before the relatives arrive because I'm not into cooking and it takes me longer to cook I find myself cooking and then like oh they're gonna be here at three o'clock and then like at 2.45 there I am mopping the floors real fast so that it looks nice and it's clean and the floors are dry before people get there. So there you go. All right, moving on we've got a couple of fun questions here. So G Barnett says, could you go to the fabric store and get the soft fuzzy velcro and just stick the velcros? I saw a lady use the stick the stiff sticky velcro on the bottom of a flat mop to get the threads off the carpet. You probably could. I have not done it that way and I'm looking for quick fast easy solutions. And so I am not, I could do velcro on the other side of it so that it doesn't come off and on and off and on but then I would have to take it off every time I used it and that's actually too much trouble for me. So while it's a great idea I really like the plastic cutting board solution because I can just put it there and then put my steamer on top of it. I also like it for the fact that I have hardwood floors and I don't wanna put a steamer especially if I have just used it for steam I don't wanna put that on a hardwood floor either. And I do know that because of the cutoff technology it's not gonna keep wetting my floor but I'm very comfortable about having this on the floor and then just having that on top of it. So I like that and that's my quick fast easy solution. So again, my cutting boards. All right, thank you for the question. That's super awesome. Brenda says hello, hello Brenda, good to have you here. And Bernice says also I'm sure you could get a pad with elastic and it would still fit over the head of the steamer. Yes, that's true. I have tried the pads that I have for my other steamer and they do fit. I can use them on the steamer as well but like I said a minute ago I didn't think I was gonna love the Velcro part of it and I do love the Velcro part of it because it's so quick and fast and I don't have to stretch the elastic part around which is a little bit harder to do. It's not a lot, it's a little bit harder and I like that it's just boom, I pop it on the ground, drop it on the ground, stamp the thing on there and then off I go. So I like the convenience of it, I really do. All right, so moving on, we still have stuff we gotta do in our kitchen before the relatives arrive. This one is super important because this is going to be leading up to not only Thanksgiving but we're gonna do this process as well for Christmas. And so if you do a lot of holiday baking and I know a lot of people do, we've got a lot of customers and clients that do. This next tip is gonna be super helpful for you and then I'm gonna follow it up with the quickest, fastest way to clean your oven. So check this out and this is how to clean your oven really fast. The important thing when talking to a customer is to set realistic expectations because if a customer has a 15 year old oven it's not going to look brand spank new when you're done. You do not wanna promise that even if you have great tools, you wanna make sure that they are aware it's probably gonna look 95% better but it's not gonna be 100% looking brand spanking new. So don't promise that. And then give yourself about an hour of time even though it may take a little less than that it might take a little bit longer but you wanna give yourself at least an hour of time to clean out the oven. So the very first thing that you wanna do is you wanna make sure that in your kitchen you have proper ventilation. So we're gonna open all of the windows and all of the doors so that as we spray the spray that it's not going to suffocate or asphyxiate anyone. All right, in order to do that you're gonna just simply take off the lid, you're going to shake it and then you're going to hold your spray about nine to 12 inches from the walls and the floor of your oven. Now, if you are able to swing this get the customer to spray the spray inside the oven the night before you arrive so that it can set all during the night then when you get there in the morning you can do all the dirty work and clean it up. All right, now this particular brand one of the reasons I chose this fume-free version is it goes on cold. In the olden days you would have to heat up your oven and one thing that we know about aerosol cans is you do not wanna get any aerosol can around heat or flames. So it always seemed a little counterintuitive to me that you would heat up the oven and then you would spray an aerosol spray inside the oven, right? That doesn't seem right at all. So this goes on cold, which is lovely. All right, now the work smart not hard tools are these. Very first thing that you wanna do as a house cleaner or a homeowner if you're cleaning your own oven is you wanna make sure that you have clothing protection. For this I just use this old household apron. It just goes over my head and it protects the front of my clothes. So we'll get to see me wearing this later but have something like this to protect your clothes because you don't wanna ruin your clothes over just an oven cleaning, right? Then you're gonna also need a great big bowl that you're gonna use on the final stages to clear out the junk at the very end. We're gonna use some hot soapy water. And with the hot soapy water we're gonna use some old clogs. These are just clogs that we use. We toss them in the washing machine and we save them for projects like this. All right, another thing that we're gonna need once the spray is on there in order to collect all the junk and pull it off on the first run is just a roll of paper towels. And I prefer bounty towels for this project. They're super strong. They come in the select a size sheet and you can go ahead and use as many or as few as you need. And as soon as you pull out all of the junk from the oven, you're gonna wanna just throw these away. So these I wouldn't use cloths for, I would use paper towels. Another thing that we're going to use for this particular project and if you're going to a customer's house are a couple of SOS pads. These come in a box that say SOS on them, but these are just steel wool pads that when they get wet, they are soft enough to scrape anything that's left on the walls without damaging the enamel. So we don't wanna use steel, regular steel scrubbies and we don't wanna use pumice stones. So we only wanna use the soft, wet SOS pads. So those are your work smart, not hard tools. We're also gonna use our nylon oxo deep clean brushes, but in order to scrub the grates on the side of the walls and the oven grates themselves, we're gonna use the strong bristles of the larger of the two brushes. And then as we clean around the rims of the door and around the seals around the door, we're gonna use the spatula end of the smaller brush. So our work smart, not hard tools for the oven cleaning. Now for personal protection, once we have our apron on and we have all of our cleaning supplies, we're also gonna put on a pair of glasses. These are just clear glasses that are going to protect our eyes from fumes. And that allows us to do our job without us getting watery eyes and that kind of thing. Because it is an aerosol spray and because there will be fumes, it's gonna affect your eyes if you are in there for 20 or 30 minutes cleaning everything out. So you just wanna protect yourself. We're gonna protect ourself also with a pair of nitrile or latex gloves. These are powder-free gloves. These are just regular cleaning gloves and they're disposable. So at the end of the job, you'll just peel these off and throw these in the trash. But this is gonna protect your hands from anything that might get on there. All right, also, we're going to use a disposable face mask and this has a little tiny wire at the top of it and it has two ear pieces. So we're gonna stretch this around the face, wrap this around the ears. We're gonna pull this down over the chin and we're going to pinch the top of the nose. Now you're good to go with your protective equipment and this protects your face, your apron will protect your clothing and the gloves will protect your hands. All of the consumer instructions that you need and the warnings are on the back of the can. So if you are unsure or if you forget what we talked about today, read the back of the can and follow the instructions. Okay, do I like the yellow or the blue kind of cleaner better? Honestly, I don't like either one of the cleaners and so that's gonna lead us to our next tip. I'm hoping this is the last time that we ever use the oven cleaner again. Now, if you have to use it, you have to use it. But what I'm gonna share with you is a secret on how we can use the products that we have without using the heavy duty chemicals. The blue is fume-free and the yellow is the trusted household brand that we've been using for as long as I can remember. So the yellow is the heavy duty. It's the brand that we use all the time. And this is, it's very easy to find. It's just an awesome product and it works really, really, really well. The blue one is has less fumes. And so I do recommend the blue one if you're gonna choose between the yellow or the blue, but I've used them both. I do use them both on a regular basis in clients' homes. This is used primarily for a really icky nasty, terrible oven. But like I said, once you get your oven clean, hopefully we don't need to go all chemical every time, okay? So I'm gonna show you one more trick. But before I do, I wanna stop for just a couple of seconds and I wanna talk about some of our other work smart, not hard tools. We mentioned the terry cloths. The terry cloths are just cleaning cloths. And I recommend that you have some of these on hand. If you haven't got some in stock, I recommend that you keep some in stock just for the sheer fact that you will use them a lot when you're cleaning. And then not only will you use them a lot, but they also dub as like drying towels. And so if you have a lot of dishes, and I'm gonna hold up my bowls here, these are the bowls that I use for cleaning, lots of big plastic bowls. And I use these a lot for soaking. Like you saw, we use this for cleaning out the oven. It's also great for soaking just one or two cloths. If you don't have a lot of cloths, you can soak it inside a bowl. If you're outside working outside and you need a little bit of soap and water, just a small bowl will do. And I say it's a small bowl. It's about the size of my head and a little bit bigger. And it is really great to carry all your cleaning supplies in as well. But I recommend having a couple of these on hand over the holiday season, because if you have to send someone in the other room to clean and you need to give them some cleaning supplies, you can do that without them looking for your mop bucket or creating a much bigger mess, right? Make it easy for them. And like I said, again, you can use these as drying towels for the sink. If you're washing big dishes, pots, pans, bowls, stuff like that. And you are in your kitchen great to dry off your dishes so that you can clear off the counters and keep your space clean so that you can use that for food and stuff like that. So I do recommend getting a couple of big bowls that you will use for cleaning. And it's for all kinds of stuff. Like when we do the baseboard cleaning and we have some soap and water and a scrub brush, it's just a big bowl that we use. So we've got our, our, I forget now, the cutting boards there's no cleaning name for this. You guys can come up with a good cleaning name for my cutting board. I need a cleaning board. But we use that and then we use our great big bowls for this open water as we're doing that. So the towels. And these are what I recommend instead of microfiber cloths if you're using a lot of food or if you're doing food stuff like chia seeds, for example. I made a huge mistake the other day. I spilt a smoothie that I made in the morning and it had chia seeds in it and I cleaned it up with, I don't know why I did this. I cleaned it up with a microfiber cloth never to be used again because the microfiber just kind of like sucked in all the chia seeds and then I could not get them out. I just could not get them out. But with a terry cloth, they do wash out. So that's the difference. The microfiber will like hub your chia seeds and these will just wash out like nobody's business and then you go about your business. So I do recommend having the terry cloths on hand for the holiday season. Another thing is the paper towels. And I am a huge fan of bounty paper towels and as many years as I've been cleaning, this is the only brand I use. And I have tried them all many times and then I come away really sad and disappointed because they either leave lint or film like on glass or on mirrors or wherever you're using it. And this just does a great job picking it up. This is the selective size. So you're only pulling off as much as you need which is a very small strip if that's all you need. You can wash it, rinse it out, use it again, again, again, again, again because it is made of a wood fiber. It is very durable and the bounty is you're gonna get more bang for your buck. Now in cleaning, we typically use paper towels only at the toilet, only in the toilet, the floor around the toilet where there's been some extra splash and we won't go into any of those details. But I do recommend that you keep a roll of bounty paper towels underneath the bathroom sink so that every time you go in there during the holiday season and you have lots of family that's coming and going in and out of the bathrooms that as you go into tidy up that you can grab a selective size paper towel and you can wipe off the toilet seat, wipe off and sanitize the handles, you can do the handles first and then the seat. Make sure you get the handles first, the high touch areas. And then if you have to go around the toilet bowl or if somebody puked at the toilet or if somebody got sick or if somebody missed the toilet or whatever you can clean all that up with a paper towel and then toss those. And then you're not washing cloths and trying to do it that way, right? So I do recommend that you have at least a roll of paper towels in every bathroom of your house leading up to the holiday and then after the holiday, after the company leaves. So that's my suggestion on that. All right, moving on. We've got a couple more really fun things that I wanna cover before our time is up. One of the quickest, fastest ways to get your oven clean is to use a silicone oven liner. Let me show you what I'm talking about. If you've ever spent all day on a Saturday scouring out, spraying down cleaning out your oven. It's really disenchanting when you have to go back a couple of days or a couple of weeks later and do it all over again because you cook the pie or you cook the pizza and stuff fell down and then it got burnt on the bottom and it started smoking up the oven and it was awful, right? Okay, so here's the cool part. After you've cleaned your oven, use a grill magic oven liner. This is a silicone baking sheet. It looks a little bit like this. It is silicone, it is heat resistant up to 500 degrees and it slides right in the bottom of your oven. Then anytime you make a pie or pizza or anything that leaks, drips, whatever and it falls on the bottom of the oven mat, the oven mat catches it. Then when you go to clean out your oven, instead of hours of scrubbing, you simply pull out the mat and it catches all of this stuff. Once it catches this stuff, you simply roll up the edges and you carry it carefully to the trash where you just dump it out. Then the oven liner itself is dishwasher safe. So you can put it on the top shelf of the dishwasher. You can wash it, slide it back in and use it again. All right, now in the meantime, you'll just want to wipe out the inside of your oven and you're good to go. No more spraying, no more scrubbing, no more hours of work and certainly no more Saturdays wasted cleaning out your oven. So give it a try, grill magic. All right, so these come in a box of three typically and this is really super affordable. But one of the things that I highly recommend, especially if you have two ovens is that you have one in the bottom of each oven. So if you've gone to all the trouble and you've cleaned out your oven and you've gone through all the fume process, that is a lot of work. It takes about an hour to clean out an oven that way. This takes about three minutes. I know that I just give away my secret I did because with a handheld steamer, you can steam the sides of your oven just by using that little hose and you just steam the sides of it. You pull out the bottom of the oven on the baking layer, the oven liner here, dump that inside the trash and then you can reuse them multiple times. I've probably used mine seven, eight times maybe and then I replaced it. So when it starts to kind of fall apart and that's like I say after seven or eight times and they are dishwasher safe so you can wash them over and over again. You can just wipe them down with a cloth. They're really great. So after the holiday, immediately after the holiday, you do not have to wait. Even if during the holiday you had like yams, how they bubble out and ooze down and it lands on the bottom of your oven and then you can never get them cleaning and you end up scraping and all that stuff. That's for the birds, okay? So don't ever make another meal unless you have the oven liners in here. This is a game changer and I will share this with you. If you clean houses for a living and I know many of the people that follow me do, you can put these inside your customers ovens and I don't recommend that you charge your customer for them. Put this in as part of the job because we do charge for the extra five package upsell which is your five appliances, five large appliances. Include this as part of the job. When you come back to do it again, the job will be so much easier and you get paid every time you do the five appliances but that appliance instead of it taking you one hour to do is gonna take you like I said about three minutes and then you can focus on the other appliances that you have because you still have five appliances no matter any way you look at it but it makes your job really, really easy every single time you do that. If you are a homeowner and you are joining us today, thank you so much, I'm glad that you're here but one of the things that I recommend is it will just make your job so much easier. So never again will I go back to not using them. It's just like I said, it's a game changer. All right, a couple more things and I will answer your questions. This is so much fun you guys, I just love it. This is the Scotchbright non-scratch scrub sponge. Try to say that fast three times. This is it, this is it. It's two scrubbies built into one. Now I'm gonna get up here close so you can see what I'm talking about. On one side we have a sponge. It's a soft porous sponge that's made of wood fiber. So it picks up and it holds all the different water and the soap and the stuff that you're using in order to clean. The other side is a scrubby and it's more abrasive so if something is stuck on a countertop or there's that gunk in the bottom of the bathtub that we were talking about, you can turn it over and use the abrasive side along with your cleanser to clean that out. So two sponges built into one. Now every household needs one of these in every single bathroom and you need one at the kitchen counter. They are soft enough that you can use them on your finest dishware and they are strong enough that you can use them on your icky pots and pans. So there are multi-uses. Sponges are a little bit like if you don't clean them regularly they can get nasty. And so some people just refuse to use them because they don't know that you can sterilize them. Now this one because it has the scrubby on the side we don't want to microwave it. There are sponges you can microwave but this is not one of them. You do not want to put this in the microwave but you can put it on the top shelf of your dishwasher and you run it through the hottest cycle on the longest cycle and it will sterilize these. Also you can put them in boiling water and it will boil out all the impurities. So just a couple of ways to keep your non-scratch scrub sponges sanitary. If you have a non-scratch scrub sponge that looks like this, it's time to throw it away. And I know that it's easy to hold onto these and say, oh look there's still some life left in it. When they get nasty and they start withering up and dying, that's the time to throw them away. So you can buy these in bulk also. One note on house cleaning businesses, one per house. Don't take these from house to house, one per house. Then when you get home and you do your inventory of the day that's when you run them through the dishwasher cycle. And then you have sanitary sponges for the next house. Using hot water and some dish soap and the scrubby side of the scrub sponge you can take any plastic patio furniture and take it from dirty to giving it a shiny new facelift. Now this patio furniture is wrought iron and it has kind of a green film, green mold on the back of it. And we're also gonna use the hot water and dish soap and the scrubby side of the scrub sponge to wipe down this piece of furniture as well. Now you'll notice that we're going over all of the arms and legs of it with the same sponge because this will remove all of that film and make it look brand new. Another use for the non-scratch scrub sponge is cleaning a granite countertop. Going in a Z pattern, which is a speed cleaning technique we'll use our left hand to guide where we've been and we'll only go over every area once. This keeps us from duplicating our work or going in circles where we double back through over the top of an area we've already cleaned. This is the quickest, most effective way to clean a countertop using a non-scratch scrub sponge and we're only using the sponge side on this particular countertop. Now one note about sponges while we're talking about using a sponge to wipe down a countertop this is true for any sponge on any countertop. You do not ever want to use a sponge to clean a countertop where you have just been cutting raw meat. This also goes for wiping down a cutting board where you've been cutting raw meat. Also, if you've cracked an egg and a little bit of the egg white has like dribbled down on the counter you do not want to use a sponge to clean up the egg white or raw meat. If there are dairy products, any traces of dairy products that could create some kind of a salmonella or E. coli, it could create some kind of a bacteria that's very hard to get out of the sponge even if you sanitize your sponges on a day to day basis. So use a paper towel to wipe down those areas that have had meat or dairy products and then toss that in the trash so you're not cross-contaminating other parts of your kitchen by using the sponge on other things. Another use for the sponge is to clean the fingerprints off of a door. This would be done on a maintenance clean or an Airbnb clean just using the scrubby side of the sponge. We go around the doorknob and the areas that have been affected since the last cleaning which was probably yesterday or maybe the day before. All right, so when I get bunches of these, my heart sings. I don't know why. I'm one of those crazy people that I see something like this and I'm just like, yes! And I get so excited. I don't know why they sell these in bulk and I use these a lot. And so I've got one in every bathroom. I have one in the kitchen. I have one next to every sink. I've got one in the laundry room. I have one and like I said, we use one different one for every single client. We do not cross contaminate. I've been known to have an entire dishwasher full of these simultaneously. Like I said, you can throw them in the washing machine. You can throw them inside the dishwasher, put them on the highest hottest sanitizing cycle to sanitize them. And I use them for everything. And they do last, I would say about a month. Maybe you need to replace them sooner. It depends on how much you use them. If you have them in different areas of your home, probably a month is a good time to replace them. I do have a true confession, talking about non-scratch scrub sponges. And this is the only one that I use. And it's the only one that I use because the different colors, like you've seen the yellow and green ones, also very good, but the green scrubby is much stronger than the blue, okay? And it will scratch. So lots of people are like, oh, did you scratch your bathtub? Did you scratch? No, because these don't scratch. These don't scratch. And all the years that I've been using these, these don't scratch, okay? But the green ones do. And so make sure that you're not sending out, if you are a cleaning company, do not send your house cleaners out with the green and yellow sponges. Send them out with a blue only. This is the only brand that I use. This is the only blue, blue only, okay? Blue on blue, mark that down. But true confession, instead of giving out Halloween candy, I give out these pre-wrapped non-scratch scrub sponges. And kids hate me. They're like, ah, don't go to the cleaning lady. She gives you sponges for Halloween. I know, it's awesome. Well, one year there was a lady that came and she came in like, I don't know, September, October, it wasn't Halloween. And she said, my daughter got the sponge from you and she's used it and like it's worn out. Is there any chance we could get another one? I said, oh, yes there is. Come on in. I said, boy, do I have the right supplies for you. And I hooked her up with a little cleaning goodie bag that had, I actually gave her a set of the OxoDeep cleaning brushes as well. And anybody that knows me, knows that when the day comes and I die, they're gonna bury me with a Swiffer Duster and they're gonna bury me with the OxoDeep cleaning brushes because I use them literally for everything. They're always in my pocket. They're always at hand. And I use the blue ones inside the kitchen with all the dishes and all the stuff that could be around food and eating. And then I use the orange ones inside the areas where, you know, everywhere else in the house. So yes, these are my OxoDeep cleaning brushes and along with my sponges. So these are like my favorite tools. All right, now that you know my secrets, I have one more secret that I wanna share with you and then we are done for today. I do love your questions. Thank you so much. I'm answering as many of them offline here as we're watching these pre-recorded clips. And I'm so glad that you guys have joined me today. This is so much fun. But here is my last holiday tip getting ready for the holiday because this is one you do not wanna miss. And so my typical containers in my kitchen look like this. This is a stack of my containers. They're little tiny cups and they have just a lid that goes on top of them. And I can fit all kinds of things in here. This is a screw on lid so it doesn't leak. So I can put soup, I can put vegetables, I can put fruit, whatever I want. This is for a large portion. The smaller portions are four ounce size containers. This is a four ounce size container with a snap on lid. Again, it's airtight. I can put this inside a cooler inside my car and it can carry my lunch. But these are the two sizes that I use. So this is a big portion. This is a small portion. Now the important thing for me is to keep my blood sugar up during the day. So it's an ongoing series of little tiny meals. And I might eat six or seven of these little tiny portion size meals throughout the day. Now this is my lunch for today. I haven't had my lunch yet for today. This is my lunch for today. And as I open this up, these are just green grapes. Now this is not exciting. This is not super duper delicious. It's gonna taste good because they're fresh grapes and they're natural. But there's nothing processed about this. And this is nothing but shredded cauliflower. There are no seasonings. It's not cooked. It's 100% raw. We call it cauliflower rice but I literally take a whole head of cauliflower and I put it inside my food shredder and I shred it up. It grinds it up really fine. And then I put it inside these containers and this goes inside the freezer. Now in the freezer, and I should make a note about this, the freezer doesn't do well with these little containers because they don't stack well. If you get a whole freezer full of these they're gonna like topple over and they're gonna roll out and you open the door and they're gonna hit the ground and if they're frozen it will bust the lid open. So what I do and I've trained all of my customers that also have something similar, we use these great big buckets. This bucket fits on the inside of a shelf inside your freezer. And now I have dozens of customers that use these buckets as well if you don't have a drawer inside your freezer. Now inside the bucket, this is where it gets good, I have a gallon Ziploc bag and this gallon Ziploc bag has 10 of these little small containers in it. So these four ounce containers, I can fit 10 of these inside one gallon Ziploc bag. This gallon Ziploc bag has yams in it and that's all it is. Just yams and so I open a crock pot, I wash the yams, I put the yams in whole and I let them cook for hours. When they're done cooking, I take off the peels, I mash them up, no salt, no butter, no seasonings, no nothing and I put them inside these four ounce containers. That's a whole entire meal for me. Now they're already cooked and so if I put this inside my cooler in my car and I go all day, it's gonna have thought out and so I can just grab a spoon and I can eat these, they're gonna be room temperature. Room temperature yams, they're pretty tasty, they're not like a hamburger, they're not like an ice cream cone, but they're sweet, they taste good, they're healthy, they give me natural energy and there you go, right? So I can fit 10 of them inside a container. I also do the same with raw avocados. So I'm a real big fan of avocados and they don't always get eaten on time. You get five or six in a bundle and you may not eat them all at once. You can mash them up and freeze them and so this is a whole container, a whole gallon ziploc bag of mashed up avocados. Now this is great, this goes on top of, it can go on top of your avocado rice, it can go on top of a salad, you can just eat it raw. So it's completely up to you and this doesn't require any cooking at all. And so a lot of the stuff that I put together is not necessarily cooked. I also took this out of my freezer and this is an eight ounce container of shredded zucchini squash and yellow squash mixed. So I've got one of those grinders that grind it up like spaghetti where they're really long threads. It's kind of fun and I just put them in here raw, okay? I put them in raw, put the lid on and then I freeze it. I can put this in the microwave for one minute and it thaws it out and it slightly cooks it. Now there will be about half water because there's a lot of natural water in this and there will be about half because it really cooks down, about half squash. So I get about four ounces of squash when I'm done and I just drain it and I grab a fork and I eat it. And then I have a color coding system. This is my color coding system and I have four rolls of painter's tape here and the painter's tape I put on the lids of my containers. If you can see this is a red sticker and I just use a pair of scissors and cut it up. It's a red sticker that goes on top of here and at a quick glance, I can tell the yellow is for breakfast, the green are snacks, the red are for dinner and then the blue are for lunch. So I can look at this really quick and see what I have prepared for myself for the day. The really cool thing about this particular system is everyone in my house uses it as well. And so they can go to the freezer, they can open up the freezer, they can see that there's an entire bag that has red stickers on them and they're like, oh, this is my dinner. And so, oh, this is my lunch or they'll open up the fridge and they'll see something like my grapes and they'll say, oh, this is my snack for the day, right? So it makes it really easy for everyone in the house to pack their own breakfast, lunch and dinner if they're gonna be gone throughout the course of the day. The sandwich containers are also a really great addition to the smaller containers that we use. And I recommend having some of these on hand for the holidays. Instead of putting away a bunch of Thanksgiving food and putting it in big, I don't know, putting a wrap on it and just putting it inside the fridge or whatever, when you take it back out of the fridge, you have to still deal with it. And so what I recommend is when you put the meal away from Thanksgiving, if you have leftovers and I like to cook enough so there are leftovers so that I can eat the next week or the next couple of weeks because like I said, I don't cook much by putting everything inside reusable containers that you can put right inside the microwave from the freezer right to the microwave is a really great work smart, not hard tip. Now, one of the things that we do and I mentioned the eight ounce and the four ounce containers by putting these away and I will put like turkey in them, I'll put stuffing in the other one and that will be like for Thanksgiving, right? And so when these go right inside the freezer, we're done. There's no more cleaning it out tomorrow or the next day or the next day or whatever. And if we do get to the leftovers the next couple of days, that's awesome. If we don't and it takes us a week or two weeks to eat them, that's also fine. The food is put away and it is done. It also makes really great to go containers if you have family and friends that have come over. You can pop stuff in to go containers, let them take them with them and then they can put them right in their freezer when they get home, they can take them out and put them right inside the microwave. So it's a really great work smart, not hard tool. Inside here, I have one more thing I wanna show you and this is a Swedish dishcloth and I don't know if you guys know these or not but they come in little cards like this and when you get them wet, they're like little flexible clods. And one of the things that I like about them is they come in a multiplicity of different colors. And so I recommend that you have one in your bathroom and you have one inside your kitchen because then you're gonna have them everywhere you go. And the cool part about having these on hand is six of these, I guess the whole pack replaces 150 rolls of paper towels. And so this is just like the paper towel where you could wash it out when you're done and squeeze it out. But the cool part about this is you can use it again and again and again and again and again. This also goes inside your dishwasher. It's kind of like a sponge. So you can throw this in the dishwasher as well. You can also add them to your mesh bags and then wash them inside the washing machine if you like. And these will probably wash 20 or 30 times in a load of dishes or a load of laundry. But like I said, this would go in the bathroom because it's yellow and we use yellow scrub brushes, yellow microfiber cloths, yellow Swedish dish cloths. We use all of these in the bathroom. So yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, that's all in the bathroom, never to be mixed with green that's in the kitchen. But if you have them in the kitchen and you just put them over the hump in the middle of the sink, then every time that you have a spill of any sort, it's like microfiber in that it wipes stuff up. So anytime there's a spill, just wipe it up and then you can rinse it out, squeeze it out and you're good to go, right? So these are really affordable. And like I said, six of these replace 150 rolls of paper towels and they're 70% wood fiber. So they hold a lot of stuff and it's a really great replacement. So you're not just spending that money every single time and then throwing it away. I still recommend the paper towels for the toilet areas but I recommend this for like the bathroom vanities for the mirrors, for cleaning the faucets, for wiping everything down. If there are any leaks, any spills, this is really great for that. I also recommend keeping one of these inside the bathroom. A lot of people put like a little clip and they'll hang it either on the side of the cabinet or they'll hang it on the mirror so that it can just dry out. But every morning when you brush your teeth, if you'll wipe down like your electric toothbrush and that nasty little thing that the toothbrush sits on, it's always nasty. And then you just wipe down the faucets and you wipe down the area where you've been. This is all you need. We don't need lots of towels and lots of laundry and all that stuff. Just one of these does the trick. Wash it out in hot water, squeeze it out, hang it up to dry. So those are my quick tips for cleaning up before the holidays and then after the holidays. And I recommend once again that this is the year where you let your family be involved and let them be involved by having the apron on hand so that when they come in and they're like, hey, can I help? And you don't wanna ruin their clothes and they're saying something that's nice. People do wanna feel that they have a place in your home and they wanna feel valued and they wanna feel like they have a purpose. So yes, absolutely. Give them an apron, give them some gloves. Let them help you this holiday season because doing all the work yourself, while it's really cool that you can do it, it's not necessary that you do. So I do have a couple of questions here that I do wanna answer. And I wanna make sure that I get them all answered. This is the time to ask them and then we're done for today. So I wanna be respectful of your time. Chrissy says, do you have a video on how to clean and sanitize things like cell phone and keys? I don't, but that is a topic that we probably should cover because those are really high touch things that are inside our homes and oftentimes we're touching other things, car doors, public places, and then we hold our phones, we hold onto shopping carts while we're looking at shopping lists on our phones, our hands are touching a lot of things. So sanitizing those areas are super important. So be conscious of that as well. And you may wanna get some hand sanitizer and keep that everywhere you go because I want you to be safe and I want you to be healthy this holiday season. Bernice says, I love to use the Glass Pyrex container. They stack super well and their ovens safe the rectangular ones. You know what, those work as well. And so thank you for bringing that up. Yes, the Pyrex ones are great. I'm a big fan of the plastic for the reason that if they slide out and I've been known to be in a hurry sometimes, if they slide out and they do hit the ground, they're gonna bust. And so these are easier to replace quicker, faster and they do stack really well. I do use, and this is kind of a hint, but I do use my big bowls, like for the holiday season, if I'm in a pinch and I don't have enough room for one of the bigger containers, the bigger box containers. What I will do is I will put a lot of these inside a bucket, inside my fridge and my freezer or my fridge will hold probably about 15 of these. And they kind of like pop out around the edges. And so I've got several of these big bowls inside my freezer as well. So if you have one of those really skinny little freezers and you're trying to make room, you can put all your turkey and all your stuffing and everything in these little containers. And then you can take your painter's tape and you can just mark the date that you put it in there. So again, this just works with a regular magic marker and you can put like Thanksgiving 2022 and put the date so that when you go to pull out the meal, whatever that is, you have the date on there. And like I say, the painter's tape is dishwasher safe. And so I'm guilty of leaving it on the containers. So like the yellow, green, red and blue that I use for all the different meals because all of our meals are color coordinated. I just leave the painter's tape on the lids themselves. And then when they come through the dishwasher, I just throw them all on a great big drawer. And then as I go to make the meals, I go, oh, look, I need all the green ones right now. And I just sort through all the green ones, boom, boom, boom. And then I'm not cutting the tape for each one. But this is a system that I have used for years and all my customers use this system as well. And it saves so much time. And it saves, especially if you've got kids in the house, it saves them from rumbling through the fridge and making snacks and going through stuff. It's just easy to jump in there and grab something that's already prepared. It's already labeled. You know that this is a dinner food or this is a breakfast food or this is a lunch food or a snack. You grab that thing and off you go. And it also is easy for kids and husbands to pack their own lunches just by following the color code system. So yay, I figured that one out. Alrighty, we've got a couple more questions here. Bernice says, do you have a video for Airbnb cleaning like the steps, tricks to make it fast and effective? Airbnb is a little bit different than our regular cleaning because in a regular home, like if you're a homeowner, you're gonna clean the home in pieces. And so you may get to the whole house in one day but chances are you're not, you're gonna do one room and then the next day you're probably gonna do another room and what have you. With a professional cleaner, you're gonna probably clean bi-weekly. So you go in and you just boom, you do the whole house at once. With Airbnb, it's a little different in that we do a different kind of cleaning and it might be done multiple times a week. And so it's not gonna be as long at each area of the home. It might be because you're cleaning something three times a week, it's not as dirty but we have different types of cleaning with Airbnb. Like an irregular home is a professional cleaner and it's a slightly f-topic and I'll be quick. As a regular house cleaner, when you're cleaning a regular home, you're not gonna open all the cupboards and underneath the bathroom sink and the bed stand and all that stuff. You clean all of the surface areas and around all that stuff and you'll pick up the stuff on the tops of the surfaces but we don't open all the personal items. In an Airbnb you do because you wanna make sure that the last guests did not leave anything. So it's a little bit different. And if you guys follow me on social media at Ask Angela Brown, there's more where this came from. So let's have the conversation, let's continue this. I am super glad that you guys joined me. I have a feeling that we are all gonna have an amazing holiday season. And so again, I thank you for joining me here today because had you not joined me, we would not have had this conversation. So again, thank you for your time. I do appreciate it and I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving.