 How do you clean a weight room or a specialty room? Oftentimes it's a music room or maybe it's an arts and crafts room. How do you clean a room like that? I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer. Now, it's interesting because when we go to a customer's home, if they have a specialty room, oftentimes it's not part of the maintenance package and it's not part of the deep clean. It's considered a special project that's done at a separate time of the year with separate equipment and it's a special price. Now in my home, and this is the home that we're in right now, it's my weight room and I'm kind of using this weight room also as my recording studio. And so I'm using it more as a studio than I am a weight room. So sometimes in order to be really successful at making a really big, great use of a room in your house, you have to say no to another use for that room. So I'm gonna say no to the weight room and I'm really sad because I've loved this weight room. It's served me for a decade. And now there's a weight room that's two blocks away at the community center that I can go work out at. And now I'm gonna just turn this now into a full-fledged recording studio. Before I do that though, however, I'm going to clean it to show you top to bottom how we clean a weight room because I've got some really fun weight equipment in here that I've been using, here's the catch. When I use it, as I'm using it, I usually spray and wipe it down. So it's not really dirty and it is a special project. However, that said, we just had some home renovations done and a big whirlwind of dust came in. And I can't work in this room with the dust because it's making my eyes turn red and I feel like I'm gonna cry because of all of the allergies and the dust, right? So we've got to uncoat the room of dust so that I can continue working in here. And then along with the process of cleaning it, I'm gonna move out the weight equipment and then we're gonna make this the studio. So you get to be part of the process. This is gonna be super fun. But right now we're gonna start on getting the room clean. So the first thing that we're looking at here is this is the studio where I sit and I do our Zoom and conference calls right here. And if I move over to the side, you'll see that there's the green screen right there. And then over to my side over here, I've got some weight equipment and there's my treadmill. We've got punching bob over in the corner. I've got a great big weight machine. I've got a free weight machine here with a bench. I've got an inversion table. Over here we've got some free weights. We've got a widescreen TV over there and then we have some weights over there. So we're gonna go ahead and clean everything out but first we're gonna start with the center here. And in order for me to clean the room and got everything out and I'm gonna be moving that big corner piece of equipment over there in the far corner. And so what I got to do here is I've got to move out all of the stuff that looks like it's recording camera equipment so that I have a space to work. If you're doing a job for a customer, one of the first things you wanna ask are what are the parameters of the job? What do they want done? In this particular situation, I have to keep recording because we record frequently and most often for the learning library we do every day. So as I'm taking this equipment out, I'm actually setting it up in another room of the house so that until we get this room cleared out of all the weight equipment, we still have a place to work and do our other business. So you wanna make sure that if you're doing this for a customer or a client that if you're displacing them and you're moving something like this as the special project, that you're very clear about what that looks like when you start moving stuff out of the room because you don't wanna move out expensive equipment and then find out that you've damaged it or you put it in a place where it got dumped over or stepped on or tripped over or any of those things. So just be very careful and also never lift more than you can carry. You'll see in this video, we're making lots of trips because to carry them all at once could be damaging or what have you. Right now, we are cleaning the ceiling and I wanna stop for a second and just bring to your attention that on a special project, we would not clean the ceiling, the walls or the blinds because that would be part of a deep cleaning package, not a special package, a special project package. However, that said, because of the dust that we're trying to remove, and this is my house. So we're making an exception here to the rule and you can always make exceptions to the rule. You just need to clarify it with the customer and include it in your price. So for this particular project, we will be doing the ceilings and the blinds and just make sure that all of the dust is removed. This is a six foot Swiffer extender that allows me while standing on the floor to dust the ceilings. And this is also an opportunity to replace burned out light bulbs. And there is a special package that we offer customers that allows us to replace light bulbs, air filters, baking soda that is used around the house, things like that. And so you wanna make sure that if you don't have a special package that you include that, and that's usually a separate special package that can be done throughout the year as you're cleaning. Now in this, what you're seeing right now, and if you are listening to the podcast, you're gonna miss the YouTube version of actually watching me clean. And so this might be one of those videos where you stop what you're doing and you go back and watch the YouTube video later. But what we're doing here now is we're cleaning a great big three piece mirror that's inside the weight room. And you'll notice that I don't have any spray bottles for the most part. I do have force of nature that's on my hip in most of this video. But what I'm doing is I'm using just a wet cloth and then a dry mirror or a glass cloth to dry the mirrors. And then just double checking to make sure that there are no streaks. So we're gonna get the ceiling first, then the walls, and we're gonna do the opposite wall so that that wall is done. And then we will start from left to right and we will move our way around the room and we'll do all of the weight equipment one by one. We're gonna do the blinds here, which is just the Swiffer Duster that was in my back pocket. And we're using it because it has the trap and lock technology. And so we're just gonna work in small segments. We're gonna do both sides of the blind. We're going to open the blind halfway. Then we're gonna use the cords and cables and pull that up. We're gonna make sure that there are no cobwebs and no dust and dead bugs inside the window sills. And you'll see that I'm dusting the walls and the baseboard as I went. And then going back to the blinds. We just wanna get as much of this as possible. So this is gonna take two or three rounds around the room. We've already done one round with the ceiling. Now we're doing the walls and then we'll work on the contents of the room, which is the weight equipment. Again, going from left to right around the room and working our way out of the room. It is important if you don't have a blinds package that you include the blinds as part of your deep cleaning. This is something that should be done at least four times a year. And it is easy to do the dusting, which is what I'm doing right now, just the dusting on a regular maintenance clean. And again, this is the maintenance clean or the deep clean is not part of a normal special room package like this. This weight equipment would be a special package. But because of the dust, we wanna make sure that we get all that right now. And you have to be careful when working around weight equipment as in this particular scenario where I keep banging my head on that handle bar and you wanna make sure that you're very careful about where you put the cables of the blinds because you don't want to vacuum them up later. And there's one here that drops on the floor. And then as I go to vacuum and I get close to vacuuming it up, you gotta be careful about that. And you'll notice that in my apron, I have my wet cloth and I'm just wiping down with the damp cloth. I'm wiping down the equipment. So I do have my force of nature here, which is a mixture of vinegar and salt water. And then it is electrolyzed so that it removes the vinegar-ness of it and it changes the molecular structure of it so that it becomes a sanitizer. And so without any heavy-duty chemicals, we're spraying the cloth, not the equipment itself, and we're wiping down all of the leather and the metal and the plastic and just making sure that it's sanitized and it doesn't have any dust or any sweat or anything on this equipment. And after each use of a piece of equipment, the equipment is wiped down. But today, primarily, we're looking to get rid of the dust because there's just a big coat of dust everywhere. I'm gonna use my Swiffer Duster first and foremost before I use my cloth because the cloth will only go so far before it gets really dirty. And inside my hand, you cannot see it here, but inside my hand, I have a screwdriver and that is what is allowing me, see, it is allowing me to get between all those little grooves. And so that screwdriver just went back in my pocket and I'm dusting now or damp dusting the rest of the machine. And I am spraying the treadmill foot so that I can make sure that I get the board that you step on clean. This is all coated in dust. And we're only gonna be able to get one side. So I will have to plug that in and then turn the machine on and move the foot part so that I can go ahead and I can get the other side of that. And then once that's clean, then we'll go ahead and we'll run it for a couple of cycles until that dries and we'll unplug our unit and leave it exactly how we found it. Then we're gonna wipe down the backside of the treadmill and that's going to be to remove all of the dust. We'll wipe down all of the side pieces, the bars, everything that you can see and reach and make sure that that's completely done. And we have two pieces of equipment down. We're gonna move this other stuff out of the way. We've got a free weight bench here using my Swiffer Duster first so that because of the trap and lock technology, it will pick up all of the dust first and then I will damp, spray it, spraying my cloth and then wiping the cloth down. And this is the leather part and then all of the underneath pieces, all the nooks and crannies to make sure that there are no areas that have not been cleaned. And again, this is to promote cleanliness and to remove dust that you breathe when you're in this room. And so wiping down all of the free weights now, I'm gonna move those so I can get this big end piece out. We've given this away and so we're gonna make sure that the people that are coming to dismantle it can get to it and I don't want them stepping or tripping on my other pieces of weight equipment. So that's why I'm dusting those down and moving them. And I can't actually lift weights with them here across the room so this is not very useful either. We'll have to wait until we get that big end unit out. And the end unit is a stack of weights where you pull the pin out and you put it inside the top and it adjusts the weight stacks. And now we're cleaning punching Bob and I'm gonna dust him because he turned to dusty in this process and then we're gonna wipe him down, make sure that he's all nice and clean. Don't wanna punch a dusty Bob, dust will come out and smack it in the face. And now that we've cleaned him, we have to move him. Careful moving him, you wanna be very, very careful so that you don't pull any muscles. And this is a key if you're moving weight equipment inside another person's house or any heavy equipment. You wanna make sure that you're doing it properly and my camera, I didn't realize wasn't filming here and you wanna hand wipe down every single piece of equipment to remove it from dust and also so that it's clean for the next use. And inside the weight room, we will keep a cloth and a spray bottle for after each use so that you can spray down your cloth and the equipment moving forward so that the weight equipment is clean and ready for the next use. But this overall project, if this were a customer's home, you would do this project three to four times a year. And so you wanna make sure that if they have a room like this and you walk into bed the job, that you notice, oh, hey, listen, you have this weight equipment, this is not part of our maintenance clean because you'll notice that this video is sped up. This video is sped up three times and so this room takes on average about one hour to clean and that's if you just do all of the weight equipment by itself. And so if you're gonna spend an hour at a customer's house, you don't have that at every maintenance clean. This is just one room of the house and that is the reason that we do special projects and keep them separate from our deep cleaning and separate from our maintenance clean. If you were trying to clean an entire house on a deep clean, spending an entire hour cleaning weight equipment is not gonna be an effective use of your time. And so we break up the deep cleanings into special projects where then just three or four times a year you come in and you do this exact process where you dust everything down and then you hand wipe everything down and you're sanitizing all of the handles of everything. The backs, you know, the place where people sweat, they put their heads, they put their hands. You wanna make sure that all of that is clean and tidy but again, this is a special project and for a room this size, I would probably charge about $200 to do this particular job and you'll notice this is a lot of physical labor and it's a lot of bending and stretching and moving and making sure that you are not missing anything. And this is something, believe it or not, that a bunch of homeowners do not want to do. This is my own house but I do not want to do it either and I'm doing it because I'm showing you the video but this is something I would pay somebody to outsource and clean this on a regular cleaning that would be three or four times a year. And I'm kneeling on the floor right now and I'll show you in a minute that my pants turned really, really dusty just by kneeling on the floor and then I have to clean them up. You'll notice here, and I've slowed it down a little bit, I'm dusting the pictures on the walls and the wall because that is the next surface and I did that just so that you would see that we got that part of the wall and now we're doing the area here and you'll notice that I do not do the front of the television screen and that is because I'm going to use an electrostatic duster at a separate time but right now my swiffer duster is very dirty and if I were to dust the front of that television screen it would get all kinds of smears and smudges that would be hard to remove and because we're not going to use a damp cloth on the TV screen either that's a separate electrostatic duster so we kind of skip that and that's the reason why. So for electronics, in a customer's house this is the reason we do not deal with customers' electronics. You'll notice that while I'm cleaning this I accidentally bumped it and this is my house so there's no, you know, it's forgiveness here but the TV got turned on and I'm like, oh dude, how do I turn off the TV? And now I'm cleaning the remote controls and I'm trying to put them back on and I realized that, oh no, the TV has come on. What? How do you turn it off? And I'm at a loss. I don't even know how to turn the TV on. This is not normally what I use when I'm using this room. My husband watches the TV in here. I'm like, how do I get it off? Someone help me. How do I get the TV off? And I felt bad because I don't know much technology but now the video is starting and it's beach body. I'm like, what? Let me dance for a second. Oh no, no, let me get back to work. And I'm now scrambling, trying to figure out how to turn the TV off. So if you do this at a customer's house they're gonna die laughing at you going, man, you're such an idiot. How do you not know how to turn off the TV? But this is the case. When you're at a customer's house you don't know how to turn off the TV and you don't know which remote controls it is. And you just have to be super careful. One of the reasons we don't for the most part move their electronics and all that stuff. All right, on this piece of free weight, this free weight rack, what we're doing is we're dusting the rack and all of the free weights. And so in order to get all the dust off of all of these and you would do this on a special project, you're wiping down, hand wiping every single part of the weight. And so we're turning it as we go to make sure that we get all 360 sides of the weight. And now the weight rack itself, those are the insides and the outsides of the weight rack. We're cleaning the weights with a damp cloth and then we'll come back and we'll do the rack itself, any parts that are dusty and now we're good to go. And I've got my ceiling duster, my six foot Swiffer extender and I'm dusting just the doors. And that's just because of the dust here, but that would be part of a deep clean, not a maintenance clean. All right, now we're vacuuming the floor and you'll see how dusty my pants are. Ooh, and that's just from kneeling on the floor. And after we sweep, then we'll mop all of those mats. But remember how I said that I almost tripped on the cords from the blinds. You gotta make sure that you pull those up into the window sill so that you don't accidentally vacuum them up when you're in a hurry and you are vacuuming the room. And be careful that you don't vacuum up the cord and vacuum all the areas. And I forgot right here to do the baseboards. So I stopped and I dusted the baseboards. Then we just keep vacuuming and we're closing up on this project. So this is how you clean a weight room. And that was from top to bottom, left to right, moving around the room. And now the room looks really nice and clean. And I'm having a little bit of regrets now because I already told that guy he could have that big piece of weight equipment and now I kind of want it back. But I just don't have room for the studio that I wanna do. Anyway, so that is the weight room. And that, my friends, is how you clean a weight room. Blooper alert. All right, so I have this inversion table and I put it back over here and then I thought about giving it away as well. And I said, you know, I wonder if I should keep this and I was gonna try to use it. And I tried it with my little slippery shoes on which I've never done before and I got all comfortable on it. And I'm like, well, let me see. Can I use this without the teeter boots which are the upside down boots? And because of the slipperiness of those shoes I slid out of it. And I'm like, oh no, someone help me. Now I'm stuck on the floor. I'm like, how do I get out of this situation? I'm upside down and I'm stuck on this machine. Like don't do that. So if you're gonna use an upside down machine, whatever you do, don't do it with shoe covers on. Ah!