Here's Some Expert Advice To Attack Spring Cleaning

It's a beautiful image:

Heloise - the columnist who so hates clutter she doesn't even carry a last name - standing in the kitchen with an old sock on each hand, rubbing down the miniblinds.

Hey, it's no worse than the guy who took down his blinds, threw them in the back of his pickup truck and took them through the car wash.

Welcome to spring-cleaning season, when no method is too ridiculous, no spirit too exuberant.

"People, they've been bottled up. The death of winter is over," declared hot-wired, happy-to-be-here cleaning czar Don Aslett.

Aslett, author of "Is There Life After Housework?," "Clutter's Last Stand" and a dozen or so other books about cleaning, and Heloise, whose Hints From column runs in more than 500 newspapers, took off the gloves - and socks - recently to get into the nitty-gritty of spring cleaning.

Their advice? You can launch the old-fashioned, four-day, bleach-and-Brasso assault if you want, but you don't have to. For some people, just hitting a few of the oft-neglected cleaning areas is enough.

"If it bothers you, clean it. Life is too short," says Heloise. (The daughter of the original Heloise, her real name is a guarded secret - even her credit card carries the nom de plume.) "The hurry-up version is OK. This is not the Donna Reed era."

To help you along, our experts offered tips for cleaning some of the parts of the home that sit untouched until the cleaning bug bites.

"How about deeper-than-deep cleaning? Everyone knows how to do windows, walls, carpets. Let's hit a couple of new ones," says Aslett.

Mini-blinds. Heloise is serious when she says to slip your hands into a pair of socks for cleaning the mini-blinds. Dip one hand into a bucket of warm, soapy water and put your hands together with the blinds in between, as if you were praying. Rub back and forth until you've cleaned the whole surface. Then reverse sides so the dry sock dries the blinds.

Aslett's method is to take down the blinds, haul them outside and lay them flat on the driveway with an old blanket underneath. Scrub both sides with a soft brush dipped in water mixed with all-purpose cleaner or ammonia solution. Then hang the blinds from a clothesline or drape them over a ladder and hose them down. Let them dry and hang them back up.

(Dark blinds may need to be blotted dry to avoid spots.)

Although one of Heloise's readers actually did try the pickup truck method, we can't, in good conscience, recommend it.

Doors. Aslett knows a little secret.

"If company is coming," he says by phone from Don Aslett's Cleaning Center in Idaho, "go clean and wash your doors. No one knows why, but your whole house looks good."

Nobody cleans their doors every week. (If you do, well, that's your business.) But think about it, says Aslett - the door gets used more than just about anything else in the home. It's covered with handprints, kick marks and general dirt.

Scrub the door from top to bottom with a rag and and soapy water, using a scrub brush for especially tough spots. And clean the knob.

While you're at it, wipe down the top edge of the frame. With all the dust that collects up there, it probably looks like velvet. Along with the upper side of a ceiling fan, the top of the door is one of the most-missed spots in the home, says Heloise.

Furnace grates. OK. We've gotten the windows and doors. Now it's time to get into the details. After a long winter, your furnace grates are probably full of dust and grime.

Cleaning them is fairly simple. Remove the grates from their openings and vacuum both the grate and the area around the opening. Then scrub the grate in a washtub.

If you're not going to scrub them, Heloise has found that moist towelettes work pretty well for removing grime from grates.

Garage floor. After the freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw of this winter, you probably have enough salt on your garage floor for a thousand margaritas.

There are several ways to clean the winter sludge from a concrete floor. One of Heloise's readers throws a couple of shovelfuls of snow on the garage floor and sweeps the whole thing out for a quick mid-winter cleaning.

Come spring, Heloise suggests, sprinkle powdered laundry detergent on the floor and hose it down, scrubbing stubborn spots with a brush or broom. The laundry detergent can be washed down the drain guilt-free - it's considered safe for the environment.

Aslett suggests applying a concrete sealer to protect the floor after cleaning.

Now, back into the house.

Shower curtain. Columnist Dave Barry once declared soap scum to be the most durable substance known to humanity. That, he explained, is why space shuttles are covered with tiles. Everyone knows tiles are natural breeding grounds for soap scum; once the stuff forms, the shuttle can handle atmospheric re-entry with ease.

Well, that chalky white stuff is no match for Heloise. Assuming your curtain is plastic, you can clean it with laundry pre-wash spray. Squirt the stuff along the top, letting it run down to cover the curtain. Allow it to sit and work a few minutes, then rinse it off. (This will be easy if you have a moveable shower head.)

Or you can take down the shower curtain and throw it in the washing machine. Add a couple of towels to get some scrubbing action going and wash the liner with regular laundry detergent. If the curtain is moldy or mildewed, add about three-quarters of a cup of bleach.

A third option, once you've gone to the trouble of taking down the liner, is to replace it. Inner liners can be purchased for well under $10. The old ones can be recycled as dropcloths.

A final note about spring cleaning: Aslett thinks it should be done in the fall.

"The perfect time to clean is about Halloween," he says.

Why? Well, fall is the time we start to close our houses up for several months, meaning much less dirt will be tracked in. A spring cleaning is almost immediately dirtied.

But don't let that stop you. If your springtime thoughts have turned to cleaning, go with it.