If your house, like most houses, has more than one floor, consider making yourself cleaning caddies that have a permanent home on each floor. Our house has a converted attic, so it’s three stories high – one of my huge extravagances is having a vacuum cleaner on each floor: no more lugging this heavy appliance up and down the stairs. I… Read more »
Blurgh. Window cleaning is a tough job and not one I much looked forward to until about a year ago, I hit on a solution – clean one at a time. Voilà. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier. I’m used to splitting up other jobs, after all – I don’t vacuum the whole damn house in… Read more »
Briochin is a French household ‘natural’ products brand – they make all manner of cleaning products with a retro, olde-worlde look and feel. The packaging is generally retro, usually navy-blue cardboard with white lettering and most of the products are certified by Ecocert as not harmful to the environment. I value them too for their pleasant, natural smells, often based… Read more »
Alcool ménager is one of those French cleaning products that I never came across in the UK – cleaning alcohol. It’s a denatured alcohol that’s available in every supermarket and DIY store, and comes in plain (labelled Alcool à bruler, because it’s used for starting barbeques or burning in shepherd’s lamps) and a number of scents, including vanilla, lemon, peppermint… Read more »
For many years, I’ve made my own household cleaners, mainly because I don’t want a toxic soup of harmful and unnecessary chemicals in the house. While most things can be cleaned adequately with bicarb, vinegar and water, mixes made up in this way tend to clog up the sprayer. Recently, however, in a book about cleaning (yes, I’m that sad),… Read more »
Busy doing something
Tidying up
Country cleaning