7 Missed Cleaning Spots: How To Clean Them

Wash the dishes, sweep the floor, make the bed, and take out the trash. These are just a few of the everyday chores most of us have accepted as a regular necessity in maintaining a semi-presentable and comfortable living space. But what about the more nitty-gritty bits of your home? You know, the ones that fall into the out of sight, out of mind category that you’d rather just put off until you have to acknowledge them. I’m talking about the missed cleaning spots like invisible specks of oil, bacteria, mold, and dead skin that builds up over time and can end up damaging your belongings, fill your home with allergens and impact your health in the long run.

Today we’re going through my top 7 list of places in your home that might need a little bit of extra attention including various upholstered or otherwise, fabric-covered things, tough spots in the kitchen, and some bathroom bits. We’ll be covering how to get them in their best shape and how often you should be either adding them to your to-do list or calling in a professional to make sure the job gets done correctly.

Missed Cleaning Spots on Fabrics in Your Home and Their Dirty Secrets

1. Your Mattress

If you’re getting the recommended eight hours of sleep a day, you’re going to be spending one-third of your life on your mattress. This is a large missed cleaning spots area and I’m here to help you keep it at its cleanest regardless of if you’re a bit of a drooler or share a pillow with a few pets.

First things first, buy a regular mattress pad (the kind you just slip over the edges like a fitted sheet) as well as a cover specifically designed to keep bed bugs, dust mites and other highly undesirables out! Nobody wants to think that they’ll become victim to a bed bug infestation, but those things prey on unsuspecting people and don’t discriminate based on how clean you are or what part of town you live in. These covers that go around all six sides of the mattress are also specifically designed to have a tight seal that doesn’t allow for odor-causing bacteria to form within the mattress itself. Rather than a cleaning trick, this is more of a preventative measure that keeps you from having to do the much more extensive (and expensive) cleaning procedures associated with a bed bug infestation. If you chose to heed this warning, also pick up a slip for your box spring and pillowcases to cover all of your bed bug-inviting bases. This tip is especially helpful if you live in multiunit housing as it’s been shown that they can travel between walls, on pipes, or any other way they can to find a new home.

Secondly get a regular mattress cover. This kind you can get nearly anywhere that sells bedding. These are designed to catch the sweat, drool, and dead skin cells that can make their way through your sheets and provide a secondary layer that’s easily washable to ensure these odor-causing bacteria and other bodily fluids don’t make their way to your much more expensive and harder to clean mattress.

If you’re washing your regular bedding once every two weeks as recommended by The Good Housekeeping Institute, throw the mattress cover in every other time along with the regular sheets and pillowcases.

Keeping your home bedbug-free and your mattress free and clear of stains and smells is well worth the extra cost of a couple of types of washable covers.

• Rugs and Carpets

No matter how careful you are about taking your shoes off at the door, some dirt and outside germs are bound to make their way into your house and find a home in your carpets and rugs. Regular vacuuming is the tried and true surface-level way of keeping your floor dirt and grime free, but when it comes to deep stain removal, you’ll need to call in a professional carpet cleaning company. If you’re in Calgary, feel free to contact Three-North Cleaning to get an estimate and book an appointment.

With many options on the market, you may be tempted to go for the less expensive route of buying your own mini-unit or renting something from the grocery store. We recommend against this as these units don’t get up to the same temperature and aren’t as powerful as the ones, we as a professional cleaning company with portable or truck-based units can provide.

The higher temperatures guarantee a deeper clean that kills germs that cause long-lasting odors and increased power allows us to remove as much of the water and cleaning solution from the carpet as possible. This increases the quality of the clean and stain removing ability, dries the floors at a much faster rate, and allows you to put your furniture back in its place and get back to regular life sooner than rental units would be able to accommodate. Carpet steam cleaning ensures you get the missed cleaning spots out of your rugs and carpets

• Curtains

In cold climates like those all across Canada, many people turn to a thick set of curtains to block out any drafts that come in from their windows, especially if you have the unfortunate luck of only having a single pane of glass separating you from the outside. An effect of this is that the fabric will slowly absorb any moisture that collects on the inside of the glass as a result of condensation from snow and rain and because of air temperature differences, as explained by professional curtain cleaners here. This water carries bacteria from the air and is the cause of mildew buildup in your curtains.

To avoid living in mildew filled home which can cause congestion, eye irritation, and difficulty breathing, wash your curtains in your regular washing machine twice yearly with your regular detergent, but only if you have ample drying space as most curtains are not made from a fabric that will stand up to the heat of traditional dryers. If not, I would recommend bringing them into the dry cleaners at the same frequency mentioned above.

There are also steps you can take to slow the likelihood of mildew growing on the curtains, to begin with. These include hanging your curtains as far away from the window as possible in order to reduce direct contact with the condensation as well as choosing more breathable fabrics that won’t trap as much moisture as synthetics typically used in blackout curtains. If the problem is acute, investing in a dehumidifier will drastically slow the potential of mildew growth, to begin with.

• Upholstered Furniture

Pets and children sometimes make a mess in hidden spots, so it’s easier to have missed cleaning spots with kids and pets around. In homes with pets or children, the idea of getting a sofa or armchair in a pattern to camouflage stains or buying a cover with the intention of being able to easily wash away any food or dirt that makes its way onto it may seem like nearly foolproof plan. Unfortunately, what neither of these methods takes into consideration are the bacteria particles that make their way deep into the fabric of the couch and the odors that they have the potential to cause.

To keep your furniture looking and smelling its best, regular maintenance of vacuuming away any crumbs and spot cleaning when stains arise is a great place to start. The upholstery experts at Delta ChemDry recommend a deep, professional clean once to twice a year in order to eliminate severely saturated allergens and bacterial matter.

While there is no true equivalent to the power and drying ability of a professional unit, if you’d like to reduce the frequency of having to pay for a company to do the dirty work you should look into at-home steaming units, these will reach a high enough temperature to kill most of the germs living just below the surface of your furniture’s fabric. Here CNN does an excellent job detailing all of the places throughout your home that steam cleaning can benefit, including your furniture.

Individually, vacuuming, spot cleaning, having a washable cover, or steam cleaning are not enough to keep allergens from living within your upholstery or to stop bacteria from creating odors within them; but when used together in combination with a semi-regular professional servicing, you can feel confident that your furniture is in tip-top condition and cleanliness.

Keeping the Kitchen Clean: Are You Ignoring Your Missed Cleaning Spots?

• The Oven

Missed cleaning spots are not always hidden. Many times they are in plain sight, but just a lot of work to clean. Most modern ovens (and even some on the older end) come with a built-in “self-cleaning” function. These work by either blasting incredibly high heat for an extended period of time or by using the power of steam to loosen hard to get cooked on food, with the intention of saving you time on your hands and knees scrubbing away at the built-up grime. The intention of these functions is for you to be then left with the easy task of wiping down the interior of the oven with a damp rag to see the filth free shine.

These functions also have some downsides. Models that use the high heat method, will lock the door and run the oven for hours at temperatures ranging from 900 to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. This has been known to release carbon monoxide into the air as well as being a sure way to increase your energy bill. Steam cycles will usually require you to add a cup of water to the bottom of the oven before allowing it to run at a much cooler 250 degrees Fahrenheit for about two hours. The downside to this method is that it often only works to loosen food debris on the bottom and lower sides of the walls, leaving you with some areas that will still require scrubbing.

For people with older styles of ovens or ones where these functions no longer work you are left with using the strong, abrasive products that will require some scrubbing. While many of these products vary greatly between how long you need to leave them and if you need to turn the oven on for them to work or not, they all have one thing in common: they are very intense on both your oven and your senses and will require a good set of gloves, ventilation, and a mask if you have access to one.

Oven maintenance is clearly not the easiest task on this list, but it is one of the most important. Without proper cleaning measures you’re leaving the door open to the danger of a grease fire and on the lower, but still the undesirable end of risk, old food spills smoking every time you turn on the oven. This will result in having to deal with the smell of smoke as well as whatever you’re cooking or baking taking on the scent of burnt food.

To avoid this becoming a big, tedious task we recommend using whatever method works for you once every three months. This will reduce the dangers of having a buildup of food and grease as well as make it into a smaller job each time you do it.

• The Refrigerator

One of the easiest to hide messes are the ones that live inside your fridge; just close the door and don’t think about it until your next snack break. Much to our dismay, an unkept refrigerator can not only cost you a lot of money in the long run. To keep your fridge looking and working its best, we recommend you follow these steps once a month.

Refrigeration is known to slow but not stop the breakdown of food, which is what causes it to rot. This means that when a carton of strawberries goes ignored for too long and some juices leak out into the produce drawer that juice will continue to grow bacteria. Mix this situation with a few other long-forgotten fruits and vegetables and you’ve created a melting pot of germs inside your fridge. When airborne, these germs have the ability to jump from different foods, causing what was once fresh to rot more quickly.

Eating your fresh foods quickly after purchase and regularly cleaning all of the components of your fridge with hot soap and water, followed by sanitizing will drastically reduce the potential for foods spoiling before their time.

What is Missed When Cleaning In the Bathroom

• Bathtub and Shower Floors

In a dream world, the bathtub floor would simply be cleaned by the washing away of soap from your body. To my chagrin, this is not the case. Bathtub floors have been found to have up to 1,000 bacteria per square inch. These bacteria can cause mold growth, stain your grout as well as being the source of foot fungi which cause infected toenails or athletes’ feet.

As a preventative measure, we recommend that you take one minute after each shower to wipe down the walls and floors with a clean microfiber cloth. Since bacteria love damp environments this will drastically cut down on their ability to make your shower their home. Following this key step, the next thing to do is getting yourself into a weekly cleaning routine. The shower can seem like a daunting task, with many nooks and crannies waiting for you to scrub, but if you keep up with a regular sanitizing schedule the time commitment and the number of gross things you have to see and touch will be dramatically cut down.

To start, make sure you remove anything that covers the surface of the tub or shower floor including non-slip mats and drains stoppers. Giving your bathmat the same care as your bathtub floor is key in reducing the number of bacteria your feet will be exposed to. You’ll want to be sure you’re prepared to tackle physical debris such as loose hairs, build-up of soaps, and any bits that made their way off your body but not down the drain by having hot soapy water and a scrub brush. After you have cleared away the dirt, it’s time to sanitize. Many products on the market are designed to tackle shower-specific problems such as water stains, grout lines, and soap build-up. There are many options to chose from with a wide range of natural to harsher chemical makeups. As long as you make sure the product has a sanitizing agent such as chlorine, vinegar, or hypochlorite’s your shower will be well taken care of. Using known sanitizing agents is the only way you can be certain that the source of the bacteria has been irreversibly killed.

There’s a lot of cleaning hot spots around the house that are easier to ignore than tackle head-on. Hopefully, this list of a few places that are worth giving a little bit more attention to helps you to prioritize the parts of your home that will keep you and your family healthy as well as preserving the life of your belongings.

If there’s no time in the schedule to check these missed cleaning spots and tasks off the list be sure to check out the Three North Cleans website if you’re in Calgary. We’ve got you covered for your overall house and carpet cleaning needs.