I’m so curious if people have housekeepers or not. I feel like most of my friends do in some capacity, but I wasn’t sure if that’s the norm everywhere. I have nothing against someone using a service to help with cleaning, but I’m on the fence for it personally. We had a cleaning service come twice and I’m pretty sure a wallet was stolen the second time. (It may just be very, very lost….. but I it disappeared soon after. I wasn’t using it at the time but it did have some cash, no cards, in it, so I didn’t realize it was missing for a little bit.) I also work from home and have two dogs and I personally feel uncomfortable being in a small apartment while someone else cleans, you know? Just wondering what you do if you use a service or if you do the cleaning on your own.
Since I work from home, I actually don’t find it that hard to do the cleaning. I have tasks I do every day and tasks I do every week and other things that I do a couple of times a month. I usually pop in my headphones and listen to an audiobook or podcast whenever I’m cleaning so I enjoy it a bit more. One thing that I strongly dislike? Vacuuming. I love it when it’s done, but I hate lugging a vacuum around and my dogs go absolutely crazy when it flips on. (I don’t know how people do the Roomba with pets– I’m pretty sure my dogs would lose their minds.)
After buying a cheap vacuum that fizzled out in a few months, I went on a hunt for a GOOD one. I read so many reviews on Amazon and settled on this guy. I freaking love it. I still don’t love vacuuming, but I LOVE this vacuum so much. Even though I had been vacuuming my old apartment normally, this vacuum got up EVEN MORE to the point where the carpet looked like a different color. The results speak for themselves and it’s somehow under $90. It’s a little bulky, but honest to god, it’s the best thing ever. I have converted so many of my friends and family to it.
Cut to my Hoboken apartment. We have no carpet ( ), but we still have rugs. And because we have a private entrance (plus a very dirty backyard), our apartment gets a lot of foot traffic. A lot of dirty foot (and paw) traffic. Mopping is easy enough and I find it rather therapeutic anyway, but I just knew the vacuum, although amazing, wasn’t doing enough for the rugs. I also spilled two cups of coffee on the rug in my office. I did my best to clean it, but there was only so much I could do.
Again, I went to Amazon to research my options. I ended up going with this carpet cleaner. I’ve only had it for a week and it’s already a game-changing cleaning tool. It’s pretty small and fits in my super tiny utility closet. (Which, fun story, we had to knock down the wall to replace the dryer because it’s so small that it couldn’t fit through the doorway and then rebuild the wall once the new one was in.)
I can’t tell you how excited I was to fire the carpet cleaner up. It did not disappoint. It was very easy to load the water and clean it out– I feel like every component was well thought out, right down to the flat bottom on the clean water tank because it was so easy to fill that way.
Once I got it set up, it took me a minute to get the hang of how it works though. The carpet cleaner has a wet-suction vacuum and a trigger for dispensing water + cleaner (you mix the solution in the tank). At first I did one spray of the trigger and then pulled the brush, but it works best if you press and hold the trigger for one long pull and then go back and forth over with the brush. The best part is that you can see the dirty water getting sucked back up as you run the brush along the carpet. It’s instant gratification.
You do have to get on your hands and knees, but it’s worth it. I did the entire rug in the living room in 30 minutes and didn’t even have to change the water tank. No joke, the dirty water tank was so disgusting that I can’t even post a picture here. I’m sure I’d raked over the coals for keeping a dirty house, but I promise that I clean regularly!
I bought it via Amazon and realized that I accidentally had my parents’ address stored from buying Christmas gifts. So I reordered one for myself and told my mom to keep the one that went to their house– they just got new carpet put in six months ago and have been spot treating stains by hand. I couldn’t wait to hear how it worked for my mom… she loved it, too.
The two of us were texting and sharing how amazing it was. We agreed that it was equal parts disgusting and satisfying to see how much dirt came up.
So…. I’m not even sure what’s worse here. Having two favorite cleaning tools that I am officially passionate about ( ), or writing about said passion at length in a blog post. I just didn’t want to throw it into an “On My Radar” post because I felt like it was too good to get lost in the shuffle!!
