The Great Clean and Purge Project – Week Five Update

We’re getting down to the nitty gritty now, folks.

And some of it is pretty gritty. But remember that we’re talking deep clean, here. Like a major spring cleaning on steroids.

This week, the BIG tackle was the stovetop and the oven. That was a major job, but after various stages of the process spread out over about five days, we finally may have hit success.

We clean our stovetop after we cook on it, of course. But I’m going to guess that we are not unique in the fact that we don’t clean out the oven every time (or even every tenth time) we use that. And the stove top grates? Cleaned, yes. Scrubbed to get off that hard black stuff that just seems impossible to get rid of? Um, no. Not that often. But given that we are really taking this cleaning to the ultimate level, it was time to face this monster.

And face it we did. It took both of us to finish the job because after a while, my RA said “OK, enough. Send in the second string.” So the Fab Hub came to the rescue and finished the job.

My muscles are sore. Like really sore. That whole wax on/wax off thing that Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel to do in The Karate Kid? Yeah, he had something there. Circular motion over and over to scrub that cooked-on black stuff? Hard work. But so worth it. Because look… 

Shiny as the day it was born. Beautiful.

I’m particularly impressed with this project because what did the job was a very simple combination of baking soda and water, made into a paste, and slathered all over the baked on gunk. We have a self-cleaning oven, but decided that there were far too many dangers involved from damage to the oven to damage to our Cats and Kid. I wanted a greener way to do it, so I dug around on the Internet until I found it. (Don’t let these guys fool you – they’re tougher than they look. We now buy them in the gallon and four-pound sizes.)

Seemed unlikely to work, but with patience and good old-fashioned elbow grease, the stuff is all clean. (And by patience, I mean mine wore out and the Fab Hub’s took over.) We did bring in the second string to help with the oven and stove top grates – Bar Keeper’s Friend and some steel wool. That part of the job just needed something a bit more abrasive and that Bar Keeper’s Friend is magic. If it keeps the stainless steel cookware looking new, it had to work here. It did.

Before… 

and after…

FYI, the baking soda and vinegar paste also took care of the last bit of remaining kitchen grease from the top of the microwave and the cabinets just above the stove where it had accumulated the most. Awesome stuff.

This week we also tackled:

• Purging and re-organizing the office files
• Sorting through a huge box of Kidzilla’s school papers and deciding what to keep or toss. That becomes a scrapbook project for me and Zilla later. Anybody who knows me is laughing right now because scrapbook project is not a term I throw around. Too crafty. But we probably shouldn’t keep her stuff in a box forever.
• Heavy-duty cleaning of the bathtub in our room. Not because it was exceptionally filthy, but because the jets needed to be cleaned out.
• Moving the rest of the give-away or sell items from the downstairs family room into the newly-cleaned garage.
• Cleaned and organized the laundry room.

The Hub pointed out today that the purging, organization, and re-organization that we’ve put in place over the last few weeks is helping us in so many ways. Chores get done faster, daily tasks don’t pile up and end up forgotten, and we are all a lot less stressed. To many people, that may seem like a great big “duh.” And it might be. But here, where all three of us operate with various types of ADD/ADHD, it is a major help. And I’ll get to more on that soon because in truth, the vast majority of this Project has to do with all of that.

In the meantime, we have just a few more major things to tackle, so come back next week for the final installment and wrap-up of The Great Clean and Purge Project.

And for those of you who asked to be inspired this week…get out there and get purging!