Being a good housewife is a full-time job and has a lot of duties – from taking care of the children, to cooking and cleaning. While I will not talk about how to bring up your offspring, I would like to give you some cleaning advices that have been proven effective over the years. In a series of posts I will talk about cleaning techniques from the past, witty tricks and innovations in the field of hygiene. I hope I can help you reduce the usage of chemical-based cleaning products that are potentially harmful for you and your family. Also, my goal will be to save you time off cleaning by guiding you through the path of being a good, but not exhausted housewife. Last, but not least, my advices will save you a lot of money from expensive, yet not so efficient cleaning products. Hopefully you will start feeling more confident about your skills as a housewife and you will start looking and the cleaning duties as more of an excitement, rather than a burden.

One of the most important cleaning tasks at home is also one that has to be done most often. I am talking about dusting. Many housewives are maniacs about cleaning and sanitizing their homes. They worship the vacuum, the mop and the broom. However, it seems like the more you clean the more dust you can see in your home. And this is not a thing to turn a blind eye to. We are talking about billions of small particles that can cause allergic reactions and rashes. There is no place at your home where dust cannot settle – curtains, carpets, tables, mattresses, etc. all have the perfect conditions of the growth of flora and fauna. That’s why the home dust is a nemesis for every good housewife. The carpets used nowadays are too good for the dust to pass and they are a potential habitat for germs and bacteria. What you have to do is quite simple – air the rooms as often as you can; vacuum every day; wash your sheets once a week on a 60 degree Celsius program; cover the furniture. There are sprays you can buy that affect the bacteria and can prevent it from coming to your home.

Here is some “dusty” statistics.

42 million tons of dust is piled on in the USA alone. 30 million of which is with natural origins, and 12 million comes from people. Every day you lose between 0.5 and 1 gram of dead skin. 7 % of the dust in the world comes from forest fires. Every year 10 thousand tons of space dust comes to Earth. In a house with six rooms every year 15 kg of dust is formed.