How not to clean the house

I am OCD when it comes to cleaning. Mess, finger prints, lint in the carpet, scuff marks on the tiles, they all just make me want to gag. While I am OCD about mess and cleanliness I also like to complain about how much I have to clean at the same time. I dig my own grave with my OCD ways and always try and find someone to blame or carry on that my husband doesn't do enough around the house even though I end up redoing what he does do anyway. It's a complicated affair, one not even I understand half the time. In fact I will often start ranting and raving in my head while mopping the floor "god why doesn't darling husband do this more often" when in actual fact it is generally he who does the floors anyway. My brain starts trying to immediately pass the buck and it's my rational side that needs to remind it to chill out. See, my cleanliness really is an issue, it messes with my head.

I have a habit of also saying out loud "I don't know who does this, but I am so sick of the mess" almost as if I am living with 100 people and can't be quite sure who tipped a bucket of little people over the floor or spilt milk on the carpet. It's as if I don't know who made the mess when I actually do. Strange and complicated I know. Don't even bother trying to understand my cleaning ways.

Having two children, a dog and a boof of a husband will do that to you. There is no end to the work one has to do around the house. You could clean for the rest of your life and still find more to do, a bit like painting the harbour bridge, once you get to the other end you have to start all over again. All that aside, I recall just before I had my son that I was stressing about how I would be able to keep on top of the cleaning once I had a baby to look after. A friend told me that you eventually learn to drop your standards and let go. I dropped my standards in some areas but ended up replacing my desire to be neat and tidy with other things. While I wasn't able to do my big Saturday morning whole house top to bottom clean with the stereo pumping what I was able to do was iron things while the baby slept instead. I ironed baby socks, baby singlets, tea towels, I once even ironed my bedspread while it was on the bed because it had a few creases. I simply replaced my habit with another equally weird OTT/OCD one. I am still OCD, I still clean incessantly and constantly and am proud of how well this house has shaped up after 5 years of wear and tear and 2 years of brutality from a toddler however there was one thing that niggled at me and it was the grout in the downstairs tiled kitchen dining area and it all started with grout in the bathroom.

Somehow as if over night mould sprouted in my shower. Prior to the invasion I had boasted a pristine girlie bathroom that no mould was welcome in. If I saw mould I killed it dead with every bit of chemical product and man power I could find. This time though it wouldn't budge and the lime scale was getting pretty bad too. I decided I needed the heavy stuff and went to Bunnings. I found an enormous wall of chemicals and got as excited over them as I would do a new pair of shoes or some new products of beauté. I picked Long Life grout cleaner and some CLR cleaner. These two were based on acid and that was a good thing, this shower needed acid!! The CLR worked pretty well on the lime scale but didn't remove it all, the Long Life however didn't work what so ever so I decided on some vinegar and bi-carb soda. That seemed to stop the growth until it sprouted behind the tiles and grout. What had I done? It appeared, when I got up close that the Long Life had actually eaten the grout and given mould a new home behind the tiles which I now couldn't remove. I had inadvertently made the problem worse. The grout that was keeping moisture away from the tiles was no longer and I had trapped mould unable to scrub or burn it away with acid. Damage done!

This didn't stop me. I just decided that perhaps the Long Life was too harsh for the shower and probably should have done a test patch like the instructions said. But who actually does that any way? I'm far too impatient for that sort of nonsense. Perhaps there was different grout for different surfaces and uses and thought that it was likely that the downstairs tiled area would have harder wearing grout more able to withstand grout cleaner so I set out to clean downstairs. Now, Long Life is serious stuff, sulphuric acid serious and it did wonders for the grout but cleaning it required a lot of scrubbing, wiping off the acid, wiping again, mopping after and then a very thorough wash of the mop after so no acid got near the polished floor boards. It was essentially a massive pain in the arse, but the floors looked unreal once done, almost new even. I stopped and marveled at my handy work for days after and talked to everyone I knew about Long Life as if I had such a boring life I could not talk about anything else. Some thought it was great, others thought I was crazy to be so sick for cleaning products.

5 months on the grout was getting grubby again and the very thought of cleaning it festered in my mind. While the Long Life did the job it was still a little harsh on the floors, were there was an air pocket in the grout, it ate through it and left little black spots speckled here and there. You also needed a face mask, lots of gloves, lots of old towels and lots of time. I had the face masks and towels and gloves but time I did not. I decided to mix a concoction of my own this time. A little boiling water, some bleach from the laundry, some detergent and then the infamous bi-carb. With each dash of product I added, I lent back in case I inadvertently made my own home bomb. I had no idea if the combination of chemicals would explode in my face or burn my hand off. It did neither and in almost a quarter of the time it took to use the Long Life and it's arduous process of spraying, leaving to sit, scrubbing, wiping, cleansing and mopping I was done and again marveled at my beautiful floors but the joy didn't last very long. Oh how wrong was I.

I had done it again! A bit like my grout in my bathroom and the time I left exit mould too long in the sink and it tarnished the metal drain. The bi-carb had left this grainy, rough, chalky residue over the entire floor. Not only was I adding bi-carb to this potent concoction I was also tipping some on the floor to dab my brush in as a bit of extra abrasive. You stupid woman! I literally said out loud "what have I done?" I was panicked. Had my OCD tendencies resulted in complete destruction of my the entire downstairs kitchen and dining room? What do I do, what do I do I thought. How do I fix this? I was worried that I had damaged the surface of the tiles. It looked as if they had shriveled a bit under the strain of this concoction I brewed up. I dashed to the kitchen draws and pulled out the scraper and tried to scrape this chalky residue off. Some came away, but there were lots of smears and mess everywhere. What was being removed was a super fine white dust, quite possibly toxic. A bleach bi-carb dust! Brilliant. I was now going to not only ruin my tiles but poison my entire family.

I needed to think quick. I boiled up some water and got a scourer and a bit of detergent and thought maybe I could scrub and wipe it off. Burning my hands in the process I went on hands and knees again over the floors begging for this treatment to work. The whole time I was thinking how much it would cost to repair and if this didn't work I was going to be in big big trouble. In the end I had to scrape, scrub and mop the floors 3 times to remove the baked bi-carb and it did come off but my mistake essentially tripled the time it took to clean the floors and made a serious mess in the process, one that took the good part of a day to remedy.

So, my moral to this OTT and slightly ridiculous story is don't use Long Life grout cleaner, I actually think it's meant for outdoor use on much harder wearing surfaces and don't use bi-carb. While it is nice to think you're being environmentally friendly and all you may just find yourself creating far more work for yourself than you planned. Patch testing is vital. For the price of waiting a mere 24 hours after a patch test you might actually save yourself a lot of money and heartache when you realize that not following the instructions means you need to re-tile and re-grout your entire downstairs eating/kitchen area, just a quiet $20,000.

Put down the sulphuric acid and walk away!