hi welcome to Midwest magic cleaning my name is Stone Cold Steve Boston and this week on Tik Tok I saw a video of a girl who is living in kind of a nightmare hoarder situation I currently live and have always lived in what you would call a filthy house it's really really dirty and disgusting but also a hoarder's house there are two types of kids who come out of a hoarder house there's me and my siblings basically there's me who obsessively cleans my room and keeps my space so organized that when other people move things
around I get intensely stressed out and everything has to be exactly perfect my siblings on the other hand do not know how to clean and they will either have to learn how to clean on their own when they're older and they decide they want to do that or they'll have to learn how to clean in between then it's all up to them maybe they'll repeat the pattern and their houses will look like this too it's really you know what they ever they decide they're going to do I'm pretty sure my sister will escape it probably
not my twin brother though so anyway she's talking about her dad's hoarding and she's basically barricaded herself into her bedroom because she can't handle being out into the rest of the house and that got me to thinking uh my wife actually pointed out that it's not really intuitive like you don't expect somebody to just know how to cook they know that there's a pan and there's some meat and you need to put it on there's like heat involved somehow but they have to be taught how to do it so I didn't realize that cleaning isn't
really intuitive for a lot of people so we're going to start from scratch and I'm I'm going to show people who have never been taught how to actually do basic cleaning so the first problem that people run into I think and I ran into this whenever I was in uh my first apartment which is you go to the store and you just buy kind of one of everything because like this says it's for furniture and this says it's for wood and this says it's for like kitchen counters and surfaces and uh this is for ovens
and this is for wood and this is for leather and like this is for toilets and this is for goo and stickers and so the whole thing is you don't need all of this stuff but there's a a desire to buy it all because they all say they do different things so we don't need all this stuff so we're going to get these off here real quick and we're going to I said get them off here and then we're going to show you you what you actually need in order to clean which is just basically
two items we're going to use this and we're going to use this which is just alcohol you can also use bleach but I'm allergic to bleach so I use alcohol so let's get started so the very first thing we use is what I call APC it stands for allpurpose cleaner this bottle is just filled with 70% strength isopropyl alcohol just fill it up as much as you can we're going to put like half a teaspoon of dawn dish soap in it or any dish soap really uh five or six drops is all you need and
this is for sanitizing we're going to clean everything in two steps uh the first is going to be an emulsifier which gets rid of dirt and grease and grime that's the grime level of cleaning then we're going to follow behind it with sanitizing spray the only other things that we'll need will be uh special cleaner for the toilet which they call toilet cleaner and then we need a scouring agent for the bathtub I use barkeeper friend Comet works really anything that's got kind of a scouring agent to it will work but we'll talk about that
in a little bit these are specialty items you technically don't need them for anything but we're going to use them cuz it makes it easier you'll also hear a whole bunch of cleaning channels talk about using a microfiber cloth and you'll hear people complaining about microfiber cloths because if you have dry hands these stick to your hands and they feel weird you don't need microfiber for anything they help they're great but you can actually get away with just a plain old everyday dish rag but you're going to need a couple of them and in fact
I mean if you if you really don't have the money you can genuinely just cut up an old t-shirt and use that any rag Works we're going to grab a couple of these and we're not going to use microfiber just yet we'll get into more detailed things here in a little bit and I'll show you why they're a little bit better we're going to grab two of these Rags we're going to use one for cleaning and one for drying all right and the only thing we're going to do is we're going to take take stuff
off of this counter and we're going to use a two-step process it's really fast it shouldn't take hardly any time at [Music] all now the thing is we don't necessarily have to take it all off of the counter we can just move things around in order to free up space so let's just take all this stuff and move it over here so we can free up this section of the countertop we're going to grab one rag so this is about as simple as it gets we're going to use some warm water soak down this rag
ignore my dishes we'll get to that we're going to put a tiny amount of dish soap on it just like that just a few drops and kind of get this all mixed together together to where it's uh got a little bit of suds but it's not like foaming up like crazy then we're going to take this and ring it out so the rag is going to be damp but not soaked this rag that we just put the soap into and we're just going to scrub this down this will end up getting rid of grease and
grime so that we can sanitize then we're going to take another rag right behind it and we're just going to dry this off people ask all the time do you have to rinse this stuff off if you want to feel free it's not necessary because this is doing the same thing that water is going to do it's moving the cleaning supplies off of the surface most times you're going to see me talking about this which is Mr clean's Clean Freak and we can we also talk about things like Zep Degreaser and just Lysol cleaners any
cleaner that comes in a spray bottle like this so this is just what we just did except for this is just an easier version way more expensive though we're going to spray it down just Mist it and then let it sit there for a few seconds then we're going to wipe it down don't forget your edges and that's it we don't have to worry about rinsing things off we don't need to worry about drying it down if you want to go over it again with the dry side of the rag feel free so what we
did there was we got rid of the grease and grime and dirt that's on the surface of the countertop so that we can sanitize it with this if we were to just use a sanitizer on it the dirt's actually protecting the countertop from getting sanitized so after we clean the the grease and grime and dirt off we're just going to mist it down with our little alcohol spray you don't have to soak it down you just want to mist it it's just my spray bottle kind of sucks you want to let this set for at
least 30 seconds that gives this enough time to make contact with germs and bacteria it's going to smell like alcohol because it's alcohol but that evaporates pretty quickly after it's set for about 30 seconds all we're going to do is wipe it down and that's it now that is cleaned and sanitized and all we have to do is do the second half of this countertop and we're done I won't show you that because it's the same thing we just did but we'll put things back real quick my wife has ADHD so we keep her we
can keep her piles there but I just put them in a kind of an organized symmetrical uh style that badly needs clean but I'm not going to do it just yet because I'm lazy and I don't have to it's my house it's my house before you do anything else I should have made this step one but I wanted to say a bunch of stuff first so we're going to do the second um we're going to grab some toilet cleaner I usually shake it up a little bit probably doesn't need it but I usually do open
this up make sure that you got gloves on this is my toilet my poop I don't care so put on some gloves we're going to turn this upside down and point this tip upward into the bottom of this toilet bowl and we're going to [Music] squeeze the mistake I see most people making is they use way too much of this you just need to have it make contact with the underside of the toilet and then make sure it coats the sides that's it we're going to let this sit for a really long time as long
as we can possibly let it sit we'll clean the whole rest of the house then we'll come back to this now we're going to do the window the same way we did the countertop but I'm going to show you a better way to do the window if you've got the money to do it uh we're going to take the Soapy Rag and wipe off all the dog nose prints then before this dries we're going to take a dry rag and dry this down you're going to clean this exactly the way you clean your glasses whenever
you take your glasses off and you clean it with your shirt tail you're not using any special chemicals you're just drying it with your shirt tail to get the streaks off that's what that dry rag is for then we're going to do the outside of this the same way so we've used no special cleaners whatsoever all we used was dish soap and a dry rag that's it so why do people use things like Windex or alcohol or all the specialty glass cleaning things mainly it just makes it easier and faster so I'll show you that
on the top part of this window so for this one we're going to use our alcohol mixture a microfiber Rag and an ultra fine microfiber the difference between these two is this one actually feels like fiber you can actually feel the cloth part of it this one is smooth almost like polyester or silk and all we're going to do is very quickly spray this down with our alcohol solution wipe it off with microfiber and dry it with ultra fine microfiber to get rid of the streaks and that's all it takes there's no scrubbing or anything
I'll do it on the outside so you can get the you can see the water spots disappear and that is much much faster than the dish soap method you only use expensive products that you buy to increase your speed and the ease of use that's the only reason you want to buy products they're specifically meant for stuff like this so suck it so we're going to use the same same stuff on the bathroom mirror because even though this is meant for the s for sanitizing the added effect that this has is that it happens to
be a really good Shiner it shines up glass mirrors Windows anything that shines it's good on just don't use it on wood so we're going to clean this mirror the same exact way we just clean that window and again we're not going to spend a ton of time scrubbing it we're just going to wipe it down and dry it off and that's it you find any extra spots of you know toothpaste or whatever butt prints because sometimes I like to press my butt against the mirror you don't need to apply more chemical you can just
kind of wipe it off with the one that you've already used because this is already damp with the cleaner a clean bathroom mirror will make your bathro look 10 times cleaner than it actually is now sinks are a different story we can clean these in two ways we can either use an emulsifier like our dish soap thing or I like Mr Clean because this is more powerful than dish soap the other thing we could use is barkeeper friend I'm not going to use it on this sink but I will use it on the bathtub to
show you how to use it this stuff is super cheap and it's super uh powerful all I'm going to do to this sink is spray it down with Mr Clean we'll let it sit there for a few seconds to kind of build up um its power a little bit to make it have contact with the dirt and grime I'm going to wet down a sponge and then uh kind of drain a little bit out then all we're going to do is this side of the sponge here is scouring that's what they call a scratch a
scouring pad the other side is a sponge all of these are basically the same you don't have to spend a lot for these they just help we're going to take the scouring side and just scrub it get in between the sink the faucet handles all around the faucet then all we're going to do is take a dry cloth and dry all this stuff off we could rinse it but again this is one of those that doesn't really leave a residue now we're going to fold it the opposite way to have a new side of the
rag I'll teach you a folding thing here in a second and that's it now you'll notice down here there's some grimy creepy stuff down here that's hard water stains we could get rid of that by using a product called lime away or CLR that's specifically meant to remove hard water we're not going to go into that right now because that's a whole another level of cleaning so the bathtub is done with a little bit a different cleaner we're going to use a scouring agent and that's going to be barkeeper friend what we're going to do
is we're going to wet down the bathtub itself and you don't have to get complex with this just get it slightly wet I'm not scrubbing anything off I'm just getting water on it then we're going to take this it comes in a powder form and we're just going to sprinkle it all over the bottom of the tub a little bit on the sides now this is stuff that you don't want to let sit this is oxalic acid and um you'll probably want to use gloves when doing this because if you have cuts on your fingers
it will sting but all we're going to do is before that has a chance to sit we're just going to start scrubbing it with a scouring side of the sponge I'm using small circles here because the bottom of our tub is textured and using circles let you get around and inside that texture [Music] freak this does take some effort I hate doing it which is why I just typically choose to not shower if you're not showering you don't ever need to clean your tub after that we just rinse things down of course the easier way
to do this is just to turn on the shower um but I've got a camera right where you are so I don't want to get water all over it uh [Music] the last step of this is the same thing as we do on all the other stuff we're going to spray it down with our sanitizing spray and this will do two things one it's going to sanitize obviously idiot idiot but two it's also going to help us rinse and wipe down any residue that we left from the original cleaner because Barkeeper's Friend and Comet all
those scouring pad cleaners tend to leave a pretty decent size residue and they kind of need to be wiped up but we're going to do that over the entirety of the tub every little Ridge all the soap holders all the sides um we'll do the same thing with the faucet but that's the general idea of a tub so let's talk about dusting for a second this is super super easy you don't need anything special whatsoever just a dry cloth is fine you can wipe down whatever is Dusty if you have a few extra dollars and
you want to find an easier way to do it this is a Swiffer Duster and I use these a lot because this holds on to dust rather than just fling it off onto the floor so on the back sides of these there's two little holes on the top and the bottom and what you do is you put this thing into those holes and slide this on then you shake it and it makes this feathery fluffy type of thing pop out then there's a button on the side that lets you get different angles I usually put
it at an angle about like this maybe 45° then you can just come in here and move the stuff away and just wipe it down now it's a good idea whenever you're dusting to go from the top of the room to the bottom of the room so that any dust that falls from up here goes down here where you're going to dust next so if I was going to do this the right way instead of just starting with the TV frame I would go all the way around the top of the where the wall meets
the ceiling then all the picture frames and work my way down and that's all there is to it it's super super simple just remember work from your top down you don't have to spend a thousand years on it just wipe it and move we're getting ready to replace our carpet so ignore the stains they're nasty vacuuming is pretty much intuitive I mean you know to turn on the vacuum and use it but there's a couple things that aren't one is what setting do I put it on high medium or low that doesn't mean the strength
of the engine or the motor in this it means how far are these bristles from the carpet you basically want these bristles to barely touch the carpet so on one like this that doesn't have a bunch of uh stringy stuff sticking up that's not furry you'll want it just on medium if it's a carpet or a hardwood floor that's super thin and doesn't have strings everywhere you want it on low if you've got one of those carpets that's fluffy and has you know strings everywhere you'll want it on high you don't want these bristles digging
into the carpet those are just there to kind of sweep up pet hair and whatnot the other thing that's not intuitive is occasionally your vacuum is going to get weak and you're not going to know why there's two reasons for it the first I've already cleaned this one out last week but you're going to get hair built up that wraps around this bristle and it's going to be everywhere in order to get that off I typically just take a pair of scissors and run it under the hair and clip it and then pull it out
by hand once you clear all the hair and stuff out of these bristles your vacuum will like double or triple its efficiency so if your vacuum is sucking right now or not sucking dad joke suck it then check this because this may be just ate up with hair and whatnot the second thing is that most vacuums have a filter and this one has one as well I think it's in here that filter can get clogged up and so occasionally you'll want to take this out I usually take it outside and just kind of bang it
out on the ground to get all the stuff out of it some of these you'll have to Google to see where your filter's located and how to clean it but some of these you can actually run under hot water and allow them to dry overnight but when this gets clogged then the vacuum has a hard time sucking up stuff when I vacuum I'm going to vacuum regular and then I'm going to use this hose this hose on the side comes off there's a little button right here you push it and this pulls out and it
basically acts like a shop vac and that's how we can get along the edges of the floors and around stairs and stuff I mean this sounds like stuff that it's like duh I know all that but there's a lot of people out there who don't and so we're going to run this real quick and I'll show you how I do it this also comes off so you just twist this down and the whole thing the whole cord pops off then when you wind it this twists back up so we'll start with regular vacuuming then we'll
park this pull this out and just go around the room now I'm not going to do a great job on this cuz we we've already vacuumed I just wanted to give you a demonstration then the way I usually wind up all my vacuums I go on a figure eight get off me then this has a little clip right here that can go right on that and then you're good to go so suck now I am going to put on some gloves because we're actually going to be doing some scrubbing wiping down and gross so first
thing we're going to do is we're going to spray this down with Mr Clean or your dish soap type of stuff that we talked about earlier I'm just using Mr Clean because it's easy and it's powerful don't forget the sides especially down along the bottom and don't forget the front now I'm not going to use a rag on any of this because I don't want my rag to get poop and pee all over it so I'm going to use toilet paper we're just going to go the reverse direction that we just did and other words
we each time we put cleaner on this a second ago we lifted up lids this time we're going to clean and then put down Lids fold that over so we got a clean side of the toilet paper [Music] and when you get to the bottom make sure you get the base really good that's what collects the most gunk see that that's nasty yeah we're going through a lot of toilet paper and wasting it you can use a rag on this it's not a big deal um if you do just wash it with your regular laundry
or just wash it in a load that's just all the rags that you used use regular laundry detergent on hot and don't use fabric softener especially if you're uh using microfiber fabric softener can actually make them filmy okay we got the toilet outside done inside is super simple going to open this up we will grab shoot grab our little toilet scrubber thingy and just brush making sure that you get up underneath the lip of the toilet [Music] I let this whole thing sit for about an hour or two [Music] hours that's it and I'm going
to show you another quick tip real quick I'm taking a dirty spatula out of my sink and I have this that I made cheeseburger in yesterday specifically a half lb uh bacon chili cheeseburger and I ate three of those so suck it there's a bunch of Grease left in here I used to do a thing where I would just turn on the hot water and melt that down into the sink but what I didn't realize at the time was that's going to resolidify as soon as it gets into the pipes and it's going to mess
up your plumbing bad really bad so never put this down the sink what I typically do don't use a metal one on a any good pan cuz you'll scrape off the non-stick coating you just kind of scrape all this grease together I put it straight in the trash but you can also put it in like a coffee can or something so it doesn't get your trash all nasty gross I'm just putting mine straight in the trash but then after I get that done I'm going to take a great big giant water paper towels and wipe
the excess off the spatula and then I'm going to wipe the excess off of this and now that's a residual amount of Grease that's left and that's perfectly fine to run hot water on and just redo them with your regular dishes yeah so I wanted to show you that because I have had that problem before back in my 20s where I rinse that stuff down the drain and it did make everything back up and clog up it's not going to happen immediately it eventually will happen and you're really going to make some plumbers mad when
it does so mainly for me it's not about how you clean it's about why you clean and about why you're using the products that you're using I think in most instances the the question why is more important than the question how so if you look at for instance the top of your stove and you're figuring out why the stains are the way they are or why the crud is the way it is you're going to answer that with it's burnt on or it's grease or it's Grime um if you're cleaning a window why isn't it
shiny um because it it just needs a certain type of cloth it needs to be clean with a certain type of chemical those questions are all answered with why rather than how how is um incidental you can figure that out on a Google search or you can figure it out just by intuition and for the love of God like don't take all cleaning Channel advice as gospel every house is done different because every person is different the methods may still be the same but I clean differently for my wife who has ADHD than I would
somebody who's got OCD or somebody who's just neurotypical the methods may stay the same but every house is done a little bit different there's a method that they have called the Ohio method which stands for only handle it once to me that's for housekeepers who are in a hurry and for certain people who start fidgeting with stuff once they start handling it they just keep messing with it over and over again that doesn't work for a lot of people but for a lot of people it does so if that helps you use that but don't
take all cleaning advice from All Cleaning channels because you're going to find that they they conflict from time to time and it's not because one's right and one's wrong it's just two different methods that work for two different types of people so shut up for those of you who haven't subscribed yet we're edging up on half a million subscribers so when we get to a million uh we get a gold plaque and that's really kind of what I'm shooting for I don't really asked for many personal things on this channel but that's what I want
as a gold plaque for those of you who had asked about Jason's baby registry if you're a member of the channel and you've watched for a long time then you know who Jason is if you don't then ignore what I'm about to say in lie of a baby registry we started taking up donations to repair his house and we have gained enough to repair his floors next on that list is his windows and then it's going to be drywall I have my PayPal name in the description if you'd like to give a donate for that
100% of the donations go to Jason and his family to repair his house and for the love of God if you can't afford it do not donate Jason's fine this is a Time Project the more donations we have the faster we can get this done but even if there were no donations we'd be able to slowly get it done over time do not put yourself out on any of our behalfs ever please that said for those of you who are members on the paid membership I'll see you this Wednesday everybody else I'll see you next
weekend later
