Your home is your sanctuary. It is the place you go to feel safe, to relax and to unwind, or to simply enjoy great ‘family time’, something that is in shorter supply these days with ever-increasing demands made on us all from our work.
Eco-friendly cleaning products
Now, before we delve deeper into the differences between superficial cleaning and deep cleaning, we would like to make one thing very clear. While the term ‘deep cleaning’ may imply the need for powerful, aggressive cleaning materials, we have a surprise for you. At Smart Life Choices, we use eco-friendly cleaning products, and usually ones we have manufactured ourselves in order to minimise the company’s carbon footprint. Not only are we kind to your home, we’re also kind to the planet!
Eco-friendly cleaning products also come with tremendous health benefits
What do most commercial cleaning products that you buy in the local supermarket have in common? Most of them are scented to give the impression that once you have used them, your home won’t just look clean, it will smell clean. There’s a bit of a problem here as, frequently, ‘man-made’ smells are chemical in origin and often contain phthalates, which are known to negatively affect your health. In addition, many of you may use air fresheners to mask other smells lurking in your home and to make it appear all is fresh and clean inside. Once again the fragrances generated from air fresheners are purely chemical, and often these contain VOCs, or volatile organic compounds. According to Lung.com: “ VOCs can harm health. Breathing VOCs can irritate the eyes, nose and throat, can cause difficulty breathing and nausea, and can damage the central nervous system as well as other organs”.
All eco-friendly cleaning products used by Smart Life Choices are made from 100% natural ingredients, so when we clean your home for you, we don’t leave behind a legacy of harmful chemicals that could negatively affect your health.
Vacuuming and dusting is not cleaning
There is one problem with having a home, and that is that it needs to be kept clean, but by clean we don’t just mean superficially. With many of us being so time-poor, giving our home a thorough clean from top to bottom is not high up on our ‘to do’ list whenever we find ourselves with some spare time. No. If we’re lucky, we might just have the inclination to run the vacuum around the place and do a bit of dusting, more for the sake of appearance than for maximising the benefits a truly clean home can bring you or, more to the point, to maximise your health and overall well-being.
What, exactly, is a clean home?
When we talk about your health and cleanliness in the same sentence, it would be easy to think that we were talking about personal cleanliness, but we’re not. We’re talking about the cleanliness of your home. We also want to make it abundantly clear that in no way are we implying that any of you live in a filthy home that may reflect a total disregard for the way you actually live. That most definitely is not the case. However, when we talk about cleaning your home, we’re going way beyond the superficial and talking about a deep clean.
A clean home in our books is one which should be as free as possible not only from dirt and dust, but also bacteria, microbes, mites, allergens such as pollen, and other unwelcome creatures such as bed bugs, etc. In your kitchen for example, not only should all cupboards and work surfaces be cleaned, but also all electrical appliances, from your hob, oven, cooker hood/extractor fan, and microwave through to your refrigerator, dishwasher and washing machine and yes, we do mean to include those last two elements, especially when filters can become easily clogged up and residue can build up in hard-to-reach crevices.
A deep clean should also include all floor coverings, all curtains and blinds, and all surfaces that don’t usually get cleaned regularly, such as the tops of doors, storage cupboards, pictures and frames, areas under furniture, etc. All soft furnishings and fabrics should be cleaned including sofa and chair covers, bedding such as duvets and pillows cleaned, and mattresses cleaned to eliminate mites and bed bugs. If you have air conditioning or a ducted warm air heating system, then all filters should be cleaned/replaced and all ducting cleaned.
How often should you deep clean your home?
Springtime and the arrival of autumn are ideal times to give your home a thorough clean. In the springtime, you will have a house that has been ‘lived in’ during the colder winter months; you may have had a woodburning stove on the go and generally kept the windows closed, encouraging the absorption of unwanted odours into fabrics and soft furnishings. When spring arrives and the air outside is fresh and inviting, you want the same sensation inside your home as well.
In the autumn, your home will likely be full of different ‘pollutants’ such as pollen that has flown in through open windows, and as the windows are going to be closed for much of the next six months, not a great deal of fresh air is going to be entering your home, so you want it to smell fresh and clean for as long as possible.
Beyond the obvious, how is a clean home a healthy home?
For those of you with allergies or respiratory problems, a truly clean home is essential. Invisible to the naked eye, dust mites and bed bugs can play havoc with your health, while pollen lurking in the corners can exacerbate any symptoms of hay fever, and not just in the summer.
Kitchens and bathrooms that are not kept spotlessly clean are breeding grounds for many pathogens, some of which we have previously mentioned. However, there are other major health benefits to having a truly clean home.
According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, the end result of a cleaner home helps to relieve stress, anxiety and depression. As sleep is such an important element of a healthy life, it makes sense to ensure that your mattress, pillows and duvet are free from mites and bedbugs, while a fresh-smelling bedroom is a joy to wake up to in the morning. Just changing your sheets and pillowcases on a regular basis will not achieve the same results. In addition, if the rest of your house is wonderfully clean, nagging thoughts of what needs or ought to be done where housework is concerned will be banished, leaving you to think of other more pleasant things as you drift off to sleep.
A clean home equals a healthier body and mind
If the above hasn’t helped you to understand the importance of a clean home where your health and wellbeing is concerned, we’ll leave you with one final, and not coincidental fact.
The owner of Smart Life Choices, Martin X, is also a qualified and experienced nutritionist and health coach, and so who better to understand just how important a clean home is for continued good health?Martin is also very much a ‘hands-on’ owner of the business and will always be happy to have an informal chat with you if you would like to know more about how Smart Life Choices operates and all the benefits of the company’s eco-friendly cleaning services. Just give him a call today.