There are ways to clean anything and everything. You could easily spend your entire life eating, sleeping, and cleaning with nothing else to break it up. Because of this, it’s important to set priorities in cleaning so that you do not get overwhelmed and quit before you even start.
Because we are in a pandemic, the priority areas for sanitation inside the house are those that come into contact with contamination from outside the house. While doorknobs and steering wheels are an important part of this conversation, so are kitchens, laundry, and floors. Also, the more vigilant you are about washing your hands every time you enter your domicile from the outdoors, the less you have to worry about spreading contagions indoors. Discussions of cleaning these areas frequently refer to wiping things down. While it’s not as bad as it was at the beginning, some people may still be having a hard time finding cleaning supplies. While not every cleaning product can be replaced with it, I have a very easy-to-make all-purpose cleaning solution that works well for most surfaces. It’s just one part lemon juice with two parts white vinegar. It smells bad, but it works. While paper towels might be in short supply, old clothes can be made into rags that can be washed and reused. Many women don’t think twice about setting the same purse on a public bathroom floor and then setting it down on their kitchen counter, but if you think about it, this is really gross. For the same reason, you ought to think twice these days before setting bags of groceries directly onto your kitchen counter. While you probably don’t have the patience to wipe down every single item (I sure don’t), at the very least wipe down your counter after unloading the groceries. Moving from the kitchen to the laundry, any item of clothing that goes outside needs to be washed regularly. If you re-wear items from day to day, try not to mix your “inside” items for re-wearing with the ones that have been outside. The most important piece in this equation is your cloth mask. There are a number of good reasons to wash the thing regularly. Even if you were only wearing it as a fashion statement, the moisture it collects from being on your orifices for an extended time could be a breeding ground for bacteria if not properly washed or dried out. More importantly, if your mask nobly takes coronavirus for you, you nullify its effects by touching the outside of the mask casually and going about your day without washing first. The virus can live in shoes, which are hard to clean. For this reason, it’s a good idea to adopt the practice of not wearing shoes indoors and having a designated place for your shoes to be when you are not wearing them. I have a shoe tree close to the garage that serves this purpose, but even a designated pile (anywhere) is an improvement over randomly casting off pairs of shoes in random areas of the house. If you are from a culture that considers going barefoot indecent, consider separating your “indoor” shoes from your “outdoor” shoes. Along a similar vein, it’s important to keep your floors relatively clean. I sweep my hard floors every day, and my husband vacuums the carpeted floors each Friday. When I worked in food service, we swept the kitchen floor after each meal, the dining hall floor at the end of each day, and mopped both once or twice a week. In an industrial kitchen this matters because of how high-traffic this all is—these procedures are necessary to get and keep an “A” grade. Your home floors may not need that level of attention, but they certainly need some. In general, the key question to ask yourself is, “Did this item touch something that has been outside recently?” If so, it’s a good idea to at least think about cleaning it. Throwing the mail on the kitchen counter is a bad idea. I would not recommend microwaving it, as some are in the habit of doing (the plastic in some stationary would give you worse problems), but I would recommend having a specifically designated place for it while it awaits processing. My mail man and I talk from time to time, and his wife actually lets their mail sit for three days before opening it as an extra precaution. Not a bad idea, but I don’t have the patience. If you are already doing all of this and want to learn how to do more, great! Purchase Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson for legitimately high-level, scientifically-based wisdom on housekeeping and knock yourself out. If, on the other hand, what I’ve said here is overwhelming enough because your kitchen is full of dishes, your floor is covered in stuff, you have piles of mail all over the place, and you’re barely clinging to your sanity as you watch it all rise up around you, do not despair. Even the smallest actions add up over time. Building new habits takes a while, but it’s well worth it in the end. Soon, we’ll be discussing how to take those small steps. As most of you may know, my husband became very sick shortly after I wrote the original draft of this post. Suddenly I had to practice all of this with far greater urgency and care than I had been doing before. If I had cultivated better habits beforehand, it would have been less of a workload once it became an emergency. Because I am playing catch-up with these things, there may be some delay before I get back to this train of thought. When I do, though, I will have plenty to say about it. Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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