 Welcome to another Winter's Day vlog. Today is Monday and I need to start on a process that I call de-weekending the house. Because our Sundays are screen free Sundays, wherein the children don't get to go onto any screen at all, they tend to mess up the house as they do a lot of old-fashioned play. And on top of the fact that I had quite a lot of other things going on, the laundry fell behind. I didn't keep up with the laundry. So everything is a little bit of a mess and today's cleaning Monday needs a lot of extra focus and attention on my part. Most Mondays I'm actually able to do the whole house as part of Flylading's routine called the weekly home blessing. But for this week I've had to split it into two and deal with mainly the lounge, the downstairs toilet, the family bathroom, as well as the kids bedrooms. And then I'll do the rest of the house on Tuesday. The family bathroom again just seems to have become a magnet for a lot of things that just accumulated and it just became a real mess. And though normally this would take me about 20 minutes, it probably took me a good hour, hour and a half, to thoroughly clean it and get it back to the state in which I was happy with it. Which is just as well. It felt a little bit like it was a spring clean. And given that we are in February, that lovely little month that's tucked in between January, which is a bit of an exciting month because we think about our New Year's resolutions and there's always a sense of excitement of a clean slate. And then March has got so much joy and promise in it because that's when spring tends to be more or less in full spring with the cheerful duffer deals and spring lamps all over the place and you're looking forward to Easter. I do find that February can be a little bit challenging because it's sort of neither here nor there. It's not perfectly winter most of the time, particularly for us in the Northern Hemisphere, but it's not quite yet perfectly spring. Case in point, I got really excited because the crocuses were out, the duffer deals seemed to be trumpet-ing, but then the next day we had snow. It's in February that I begin to make my list of things that I require for the big spring clean, which I always try to get done by the end of February. The word February actually comes from the Latin word for februarius, meaning to purify. And in ancient Rome this was a month dedicated to purifying the excesses of the festive season and re-establishing healthy habits. Centuries later, February, two housekeepers across the land, it still represents a time when we establish and celebrate scarcity in the form of lint and lay the foundations for a clean and clutter-free spring. And I'm definitely looking forward to spring. While traditionally spring cleaning happened in March, now I choose to use February to sweep away the cobwebs because there's just too much life to be lived in March with all its promise of morning walks, bouncing lamps and Easter and all the fun stuff that happens in March. So part of the process of my cleaning on this particular day is I also make notes about the cleaning equipment, tools, resources that I will need for the big spring clean. I plan on starting my big spring clean a week from now and that will be after the children have gone back after the half-term holidays that we have here in England. Being a Monday it's a soup day and I already had some tomato soup that I double-batched last week so there won't be any cooking or recipes shared in this video but hopefully you'll stay around for some cleaning tips and some cleaning fun. Now on to what I'm actually doing. So I'm starting off in the laundry room. It's the furthest part of the house that's out. I prefer to clean the laundry room first before I move on to the lounge so that I'm not tracking things from the laundry room into the lounge and vice versa. So I start off with clearing off the counter. Is it just me or is there something very satisfying about clearing a counter? Fly lady calls them hot spots, you know, the areas that just seem to gather things at a miraculous rate. Well in the laundry room it is the counter. So I started off by wiping that down and I also like to make sure that I wipe down my washing machine and the dryer. I didn't always use to do this and it's something that I've had to learn from having done a bad job and having had to get new ones so it's something that I do regularly. Every Monday I will wipe them down. I didn't manage to record this but another thing that I do with the washing machine is I look after the rubber seal that's at the mouth of a front loading washing machine by wiping it down with some vinegar and drying it up. And another thing that I always do to ensure that I keep my washing machine in tip-top condition is overnight I never leave anything in the washing machine. Number two I dry out the rubber seal. So you've got that big rubber seal. I always make sure that I never leave that wet overnight and I always leave the door open on the washing machine overnight. The washing machine that I have now is a new one because the last one the rubber seal went on account of the fact that I wasn't doing all of those things and this washing machine is three years going and there's no sign of damage to the rubber seal. I also needed to top up the laundry powder that I use. I'm buying a laundry powder from Costco. I use the Kirkland Signature one and it works really well but I don't like to have the big tub right onto the counter so I tend to use a smaller 1kg tub that I decant into. And by the end of it the laundry room was back to some semblance of order and it was very satisfying. I also sorted out the things in my cleaning caddy by putting all of the usable spray bottles on one side and folding up and organizing my rags into polishing rags and wet scrubbing down rags. I love this caddy so much. It made such a huge difference for me when I started taking my cleaning very seriously. I have this non bio gel that I bought from Aldi a long time ago but it didn't quite work out because my children's skin was quite sensitive to it. So I now use it basically for cleaning the downstairs toilet because one of the other things that I learned from fly ladies that soap is soap is soap. One of the things that I start doing is by wiping down the door and the door handle. For some reason dust seems to gather on the door in this room. I've never figured out why that is but yeah I will wipe it down and particularly spend a bit of time on the door handles and particularly the light switch plates especially in winter when there's a lot more coughs, colds and sniffles going on. And though cleaning is such a joyful thing to do one thing that I learned a few years ago was the usefulness of rubber gloves. My hands used to be so terrible because I never used to bother with wearing rubber gloves but now I wear them and it's really nice to always have cuticles in good shape and in good form and the hands not to be dry. So now these marigolds they are a staple. I always make sure that I have them and I have a spare. So I make sure that I've got marigolds in the kitchen cupboards and each of the bathrooms has got a set of marigolds. I always wash down the hand sanitizer bottles as well as the hand lotion bottles. I always make sure that there's hand sanitizer and lotion. Some of my children have eczema and so it's important for them to keep their skin moisturized. And then I will just wash everything down regardless of how clean it may look. So this is one of the things that I also learned from Fly Lady that I'm very grateful for was that you don't always have to clean when things look absolutely filthy dirty. So even though this room wasn't as clean or as tidy as it normally is the sink itself looked clean and back in the day old healer from decades ago would have just thought okay well I can skip this but that's how dirt accumulates. So every Monday I do this process. Sometimes if I'm in a rush or I have little time in the morning I will just use my antibacterial surface spray. I'll spritz that and then I'll just wipe everything down and that keeps things on an even kill. Every week I do this cleaning with the toilet where I put in some hot very hot water and then I'll use this power-forming toilet cleaner that is really fabulous. It foams up and it just cleans the toilet and it removes limescale buildup. So if I had to sum up what my cleaning strategy is when it comes to the bathrooms is I am constantly fighting limescale and I'm constantly on the lookout for products that can help me with that because the limescale buildup is so fast and it is crazy. And so this one is a really good one and I'll just sprinkle the powder in and one sachet is good for one use. I think I could get away with doing it every two weeks but honestly I've found that the best way to keep the limescale in check is to do this every week. And what it does is with exposure to water it just foams up and it bubbles up and it just really leaves a very nice clean looking toilet bowl and I do love doing this so I do this every Monday for each of the toilets in the home. It's a very satisfying way to clean the toilet and then I'll make sure to just clean underneath the rim. Another thing that I do to fight limescale is I'm always using these lube blocks that also turn the color blue that I quite like in the toilet and I will leave the brush to dry out like just by popping it underneath the seat so that it can dry out because a toilet brush can be a haven for bacteria if you don't let it dry out and that's something that I learned from a great channel called Clean My Space which just has a lot of great cleaning tips. I'll link it in the description box down below. It's definitely worth it if you're somebody who hates cleaning and you want to learn how to love cleaning which is the place that I came from. I really used to hate cleaning a lot. So I will also top up the toilet roll because this is the downstairs toilet and we store our toilet roll that we buy in bulk up in the attic so the last thing you want is to run out of toilet roll when the nearest one is up in the attic. The other thing that I like to do probably every six months or so is to replace the toilet brush. So I get these toilet brushes from Wilkinsons and they're only about three pounds the last time that I bought them but the prices may have increased since then and I tend to buy maybe five or six of them in one go and keep them in storage so that I can replace them as and when needed. And by the time I'm finished this small little toilet is like a little haven everything is shiny and sparkly and smelling clean and I love it. I even opened up the window just to let some fresh air in and it was a it was a good one. It's a nice place to start off with something small because you can build up momentum and I even mopped the floor and it was just really lovely. I had to stop at that point to take my girls to the shops they're on half-term and whilst we're at the shops looking for a present for a party they were going to I couldn't resist this little mini orchid and I just I love orchids. I have them in my dining area and I have them in my bathroom they're so beautiful and I also happened to have this old flower vase that had been sitting around for a while and I thought it might fit and it's fabulous. I was so happy that it fit in there and I knew just the perfect place for each to go because when I finished cleaning the downstairs bathroom I just kept thinking it's just it's missing a pop of something and though I have some lovely succulents in there that I've had for years I thought the moment I saw this I thought it would be perfect for the downstairs bathroom. So once I prepared the orchid itself I had to cut off some of the dead roots and you know that they're dead because they've tripled up completely. Healthy roots would look very nice and turgid and green and it just looked so pretty. I gave it just a tiny little top up of water because it was just a tiny little bit on the dry side but orchids don't need a lot of water at all in their native environment they grow on trees so they're not actually sort of sogy they're not set in water. I decided to put it up on the shelf because that window is south facing and that would have been too much sun for the orchid and in the meantime the laundry cycle still had to keep going and I had to do some folding. So throughout the day I always have a good idea of how many minutes are left on the dryer cycle in particular because the dryer particularly on Mondays is basically going all day long and each time it finishes I have to make sure that I get to it quickly so that I can fold the garments whilst they're still warm and that reduces the amount of creases or any ironing requirements. I do like to separate out garments by type and category especially if I've accumulated too much laundry like in this particular case. So I'm just doing trousers and it's just so much faster and easier if I'm just folding up trousers and then just folding up shirts and I try and separate them out by color so that's that's how I found the laundry to work best for me over the years. Moving on to the lounge now I now clean the lounge using the organized mom method and basically what I learned from Gemma that's the name of the lady who came up with the organized mom method so if I'm saying Gemma I'm talking about Tom or the organized mom method is that when you clean a room you pick a section and then you work clockwise from it you pick a corner rather and then you start to clean it clockwise whereas before I used to be like oh I'm going to first of all pick out all of the odds and ends pick out the rubbish and then move this to the other bed I actually found that I love Gemma's suggestion of starting in one corner and then you go clockwise which has the benefit of if you have to stop and go do something else which often happens with me when I'm cleaning it's not often that I'm lucky enough to be able to do one full cleaning session without any interruption it's very easy for me to see exactly where I had left off because I'm literally living a path of cleanliness behind me. So for the lounge I always start on the door that leads into the laundry room so I start by wiping that down and then I move on to the cabinet and so I'll then hoover after it and I have to admit that I was quite skeptical when I first read the organized mom method but you know I'm always up for trying things and then if they work it's fantastic if they don't work it's okay you know no no harm done you at least realize that it doesn't work but yeah if you haven't checked out the organized mom method I do recommend it I do think that it is a pretty good system to use it's not quite as mature and full-on as Fly Lady but that's because Fly Lady has been going for decades now she's been around for so long whereas the organized mom method relatively speaking is quite young but I do believe that it has a lot of potential and as long as Gemma keeps on working on it refining it and tweaking it I think that it will get to a point where it's you know it's right up there with Fly Lady so as you can see behind me it's now nice and clean so when I had to stop to go and deal with a delivery and then deal with the laundry I knew exactly where I had left off and I like that I think that it is a fabulous system for it so as I'm actually doing this I'm also making notes about the things that I need to get done or things that need to get fixed in the room in preparation for this big spring clean that I'm going to be doing after this week. Part of that preparation includes booking time with a carpet cleaner they do tend to get quite busy towards the spring and summer months so I try and get that booking done early. So this is another one of those things that I've had to learn the hard way the first set of cupboards that I actually had in this lounge we had to get rid of them because they were destroyed beyond redemption and that's because we had you know so many kids that were just playing in there with their slimes and the play-dohs and I wasn't cleaning up after any messes or anything like that so by the time I did get around to calling in a carpet cleaner I think three years ago they basically said you know they're damaged there's only so much that we can do and so we had to replace the carpet and so the carpet that you're seeing now is in its second year and I have been doing good practice on it and the carpet cleaner showed me what I needed to do if there's a spill and how to look after it and basically the advice was stay away from the commercial carpet cleaning you know those foam sprays that you see in shops that say oh just spray this you say that that was one of the worst things that you can do on them because they tend to have bleach and so they can actually damage the carpet so I use baking soda so he always said a lot of the stuff you can deal with using bicarbonate of soda or baking soda and so that's what I do and I've instructed the children to just always tell me if they spill anything on the carpets so that it can be cleaned up straight away and so far that seems to have been working plus also I asked the carpet cleaner for a recommendation for a carpet type that's great for high volume because we have five kids and along with my husband that's seven people and as well as visitors I was willing to pay a little bit extra for a more hard-wearing carpet and he recommended these these ones are called steel carpets and apparently they've got some steel fiber I don't quite understand the chemistry behind the textiles but they are they they are called steel carpets and they are fabulous let me tell I just I love this carpet so much and it is so much fun to Hoover it because every time that I Hoover it you can it looks really really lovely the downside is you can tell when people have walked over it because it's got a two-tone shade to it but it's such a lovely carpet to Hoover and from that experience of realizing that if you have a nice carpet you enjoy looking after it my plan is over the years to eventually replace the rest of the carpets in the house with a similar sort of carpet and the lounge once cleaned up it is so lovely I do like a clean house I must admit and because I have to walk through the lounge every time to go to the laundry room it is quite nice to always be seen it in a tidy state and there we have it everything has been cleaned folded cushions all nicely plumped and another thing that I like to do is I like to putter around and change things so this display here the flowers and the foliage had dried out so I moved the flowers from another part of the house and some little knickknacks that I have just to create a little bit of a table display with little Mr. Otter over here who I think would look better staring at the flowers than away from the flowers these carnations are in their third or fourth week now which is why I love carnations they lost ages now it was time to move on to the big baddie of them all the family bathroom so I had my audible on so that I could be listening to a book and just like with the organized mom method I pick a corner to start in by the door and I just wipe down by the door and then I move clockwise and on yes this is clockwise and so I move clockwise around the bathroom cleaning the the taps and cleaning the sinks etc and yeah rubber gloves on because I don't want to damage my hands as much I should you know I'd love to get the pink marigolds I think that's what I'm gonna do next time I'll get myself the pink marigolds so with the bathroom I also use this foaming cleaner and it's one that I picked up from B&M bargains but it's not as great as the other one that I showed you downstairs so I'm not gonna go on too much about that one but I have to finish it because I bought it so I also have some flowers and plants in this bathroom here because I just I love the energy that house plants and flowers bring to a home they bring such a fresh energy into the house and yeah so I always try to make sure that I have those and I do enjoy cleaning them and looking after them so one thing that I do want to change in the bathroom is I need some more prints in there so that's something that I added to my spring clean list and things that I want to do and so the other thing that I do is I will wipe down everything because the bathroom here it's a bit of a it's a dust trap we have to have the windows open even in winter to let the moisture out because the house is a humidity issue and because of that it's on the exposed side so whenever wind is blowing we just we just get a lot of dust in there and if I don't wipe down on a every day or every other day basis it accumulates a film of dust so that's something that I always have to keep on on top of most of the stuff that was in here it was just a case of things weren't getting put away where they live and hence it was just looking so cluttered the bathtub I like to use a mix of washing up liquid and some sift cream cleaner which just has this tiny little micro crystals or sometimes I'll use bicarbonate of soda and just give it a really good scrubbing so that everything just looks nice and shiny it's very satisfying on an evening to be able to walk up to the bathroom looking forward to a nice hot bath and there's a nice clean shiny bathtub there the thing that I'm still working on is teaching the kids how to clean the bathtub properly when they use it I'm still working on that one of the things that I've actually noted that needs to be done in this particular bathroom is I'm gonna need to work on cleaning the ceiling I didn't have time to do it this time around but it's on the list of things to do for when I do the big spring clean so I'm already on the lookout for tools that I'll be able to use for that when it comes to doing the floor though I do have a mop I don't quite like lugging the mop upstairs to the bathroom it doesn't quite work I've tried it before I've just found that it's better for me to go old-fashioned go on my hands and knees and just use my old rugs from old towels that I cut up that would then go into the wash on their own and just clean everything and I finish off by adding a lube block into the cistern of the toilet again constantly fighting limescale the struggle is real I'm constantly fighting limescale and then just give the mirror a quick polish I like to use the window cleaner and using this I hope I'll say this correctly I think they're called chamois cloth that just make cleaning glass and mirrors just really such an easy thing to do and the window cleaner spray I've had that for years now that stuff last ages because you don't need much of it is just like one or two squirt sprays and then it it works and I find that a clean mirror really helps to deal with the steam very nicely that way we don't get a lot of streaks on the mirror itself I can now honestly say that I do enjoy cleaning it wasn't always the case I really used to hate cleaning and just wanted to be as efficient and get it done as quickly as possible but now I do love it I do find there's a certain spiritual connection with making sure that the environment that I'm living in is pleasing to look at because how our eyes when we see things that visual input whenever it isn't pleasant you know I think that it feeds into unpleasant thoughts as well so I do love it when I've got the house in some sort of a tidy state when I get it clean it's even nice although I do make the distinction between clean and tidy and so that's all that I have for today thank you so much for visiting with me on cleaning day and cleaning along with me and I hope that you've enjoyed hanging out with me on this day I will link all of the things that I was talking about in the description box down below particularly the books etc and I will leave you with a quote from one of the first books that I actually read about cleaning and decluttering that helped me from Marie Kondo and I hope that this will also bless you and until I see you next time I wish you blue skies help and happiness bye