Fayola's House Cleaning Tips

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In this weeks issue

• Feature Article: An excerpt for "The Ultimate Spring Cleaning Action Guide"
• Editor's Note

The Ultimate Spring Cleaning Action Guide

Introduction

Finally, the days are getting longer, and that tell-tale scent of spring is in the air. The birds have returned, and you notice their songs more and more as you step out for the morning paper or head to work. You long to get out for a walk in the sunshine, but ugh! It’s Spring-Cleaning time, and you just know that if you put it off, things will get out of control, and you’ll never do it.

This spring, sweep away those old ideas about Spring-Cleaning, and cleaning altogether. Yes, much of housework can be laborious. But the first thing you need to straighten is your vocabulary.

Stop calling it housework, and start calling it home-keeping! Home-keeping should not be seen as drudgery. Look at it as an art form. Martha Stewart founded an entire industry based on the art of home-keeping. Turn your labors into labors of love, and you might actually begin to enjoy cleaning!

When everything is in order in a person's home, life is so much less stressful and much more enjoyable. Spring-Cleaning is really important, and integral to how the rest of the year will go. An organized house will actually cause a shift in the space-time continuum! Well, not really, but you will find that you have more free time; if you do the work well on the front end, you will have exponentially more time on the back end.

Here is how it will go: Do a good job cleaning in the spring, and you will have more time in the summer to play, because all you will have to do is maintain what you have already done. Maintain what you have done, and when school starts, you will have the kids organized and ready to hop on the bus. Keep the maintenance-ball rolling, and you will be able to sail through the holidays with less stress, and get to enjoy yourself for once instead of doing a major overhaul before company arrives.

Think about what it’s like when you have to go out of town. Is it total chaos and frustration with everyone asking you, “Where is my backpack? Where is my swimsuit? Did you see my .mp3 player?” Spring-Cleaning will lay the groundwork for you to get ready and simply go—without tempers flaring—even if your vacation is in the middle of winter, months after your Spring-Cleaning took place!

Inside this book, you will find a revolutionary method for handling your home-keeping. Everything you need to do a fantastic job cleaning and organizing your home this spring is right here, including ways to maintain control over clutter, and simple advice on how to avoid backsliding into your old habits. You will be given tips on how to get everyone in your home on board with you so that it isn’t just your responsibility alone to do the home-keeping.

Spring is the time for renewal of the earth, and the time for renewal of your spirit as a home-keeper. It is the time to get the windows sparkling so you can enjoy looking out at the greening landscape after the long winter. Pretty soon, you will be feeling better—about your home, and about yourself because you did an excellent job on your Spring-Cleaning, and you can move forward with the skills to keep it going.

Read the guide through a couple of times before starting, to get a feel for the journey on which you are about to embark. It is probably very different from how you are used to approaching cleaning, but it works. And that makes all the difference in the world—the difference between your breaking your back slaving and sweating over your housework, or your laying in the hammock reading the latest summer novel.

How this book is organized

There are three main sections in this book.

Section I covers complete Spring-Cleaning, and takes the approach that you intend to clean your entire your house thoroughly, room by room, plus the exterior of the house. It assumes you need to get the whole house “up to speed” so that, along with simple daily policing of clutter, maintenance-level cleaning will be enough to keep your house clean and presentable.

Section II eases you into maintaining what you have just accomplished by performing a real Spring-Cleaning. You will find daily, weekly, rotational, and seasonal cleaning lists for keeping it all under control. Having it all under control, you will find that Spring-Cleaning is no longer a massive undertaking! You will discover when you read the seasonal maintenance list that the things that you will actually be doing come spring do not involve the entire house!

Section III offers tips, tricks, techniques, and even recipes for home-made cleaning products. You might be surprised that you can save money and time by using things like baking soda and vinegar to clean, rather than running to the store and buying twenty dollars worth of cleaning products. You might even have a little fun mixing them and tweaking them to your preferences, and sharing the recipes with your friends.

You are encouraged to read and re-read all of the sections often, so that what is contained in this book simply becomes integrated into the way you do things.

Do not be daunted or discouraged by how much cleaning there is to be done in your home. It only looks overwhelming to you because you don’t know where to start! You will soon be learning a different way of doing things, planning ahead and breaking it down into manageable segments, so that it will not seem as insurmountable as all that.

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Thank you to all of you who have sent me your words of congrats and also words of encouragement – particularly those of you who have gone through the grad school experience.

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