-CLEAN LIKE A PRO_ Cleaning the Toilet!.

Let me just start by saying I'm not perfect and my house isn't perfect. In fact, today I have not tidied my house for the purposes of this video to prove a point. As someone who has over 15 years of professional cleaning experience, both from running a cleaning business and cleaning myself, and of course managing a home and doing this YouTube channel, I know what to look for very quickly in a home to assess just how clean it is. So if I come to your house, I'm not judging you, but I can't help it. These eyes are specially trained to pick out what's dirty and what's clean. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through my house and show you the areas that a professional cleaner would look at to very quickly gauge how clean your house is. Don't freak out, but use this information to your advantage. It's helpful. I'm going to take my shoes off and we're going to get started. It's me from the future. I just want to let you know there is a sale at Makers Clean. Certain items are up to 40% off. You don't need a coupon code. Just go to the link down below. Some of the items that we have a sale on are, whoa, hello, glass and electronics cloth, our famous waffle weave cloth, our brand new luxury, and you're not going to believe this one, our towels, our luxury bath towels are on sale too. Okay, go check it out and let's get back to this video. Stepping into someone's home is a full sensory experience. And one of the first things I notice when I walk into someone's home is the smell. Now, when we walk into our own homes, we're so used to that smell that Febreze actually coined the term nose blind, meaning that we're essentially blind to the way our own homes smell. But a smell actually tells you so much about a space. How stuffy it is. Do they have pets? How frequently are they emptying their garbage? Is there a mold issue? Do you see where I'm going with this? Professional cleaners are pretty smart. They can smell their way through a cover-up like a candle or a spray or a plug-in. If you really want to deal with a smell, you've got to find the source of the odor and deal with that, whether it's laundering blankets or cleaning your soft surfaces, dealing with that garbage or that mold issue. But there are a couple of other things you can do to make sure that your house smells nice and fresh. I've got some videos for you linked down below, some great ideas on how to make your own scents for the house, and also some videos about air purification and how to keep your air clean. Floors are one of the largest surfaces in a home. And to make matters a little bit more challenging, they are the lowest horizontal surface that you're going to get. And I always say, dust and dirt falls from the top to the bottom. So if it's going anywhere, it's going on the floors. When I walk into a home, my eyes go straight forward and directly down. I can tell pretty quickly by looking at a floor just how clean or how dirty it is. Now, you might notice that the color of my floor was chosen pretty strategically. It's light. Light floors are actually much easier to mask dirt on than dark floors would be, specifically because dark floors show a lot of hair, but they also show a lot of foot oils. So if you like to walk around barefoot on hard floor surfaces, you will notice footprints on dark floors much quicker than you would on light floors. That's another thing I look for, is the finish of the floor consistent. So my floors are textured so that you can't see all the time how perfectly clean they are. If you have a flat, shiny, glossy surface, it's like walking on a piano. You have to make sure your floors are immaculate all the time. So when I walk into a home, I kind of look for those things to see just how clean or how dirty a floor is. That would tell me if I need to spend extra time cleaning it. And if you want to have some great floor care ideas, specifically on how to clean hard floor surfaces, I will link a video for you to check out down below. You've probably seen a scene of a movie or a show where some super snooty person walks up to a surface and goes and just looks at their dusty finger. Well, there are some obvious places that you should be dusting, but I can tell you, you don't even have to do that finger swipe test to know where the dust is, the hidden places where dust is. And I can just do a quick glance and I can tell. So the places that I look are kind of the forgotten spots, like the mantles. And by the way, mantle for me, I'm 5'5", is kind of right at my eye level. So by me just going a casual like this, casual glance, I can see if that's dusty or not. Then I'll just quickly look down at the baseboards. Again, something most baseboards are white, you don't need to actually ever touch because you will see contrasting dust or dirt or stains directly on the white baseboard. I will also look at vents, specifically ones in the floor or on the wall, whether it's high or low. If there's a buildup of dust, it tells me that those haven't been dusted or cleaned in a while. And same with windowsills. Again, they're generally white. So if I just do a quick glance, I can see if they are dusty, dirty, et cetera. This, as a professional cleaner would tell me, I've got to spend extra time doing the details so I know I would build more time into that cleaning. And for someone who is just looking for ways to put that extra polish on their home, these forgotten areas would be things that a professional cleaner would pick out and something that would make a difference for you. Now, don't let the clutter behind me distract you. Trust me, I'll cover that in a moment. I want to talk about walls and points of contact because when I walk into a home, listen, you're entitled to live your life the way you want. But at the end of the day, if a professional cleaner is coming in, one of the things that is going to add extra time onto their work is if there are a lot of fingerprints and marks on the walls and on the points of contact. Now, generally speaking, points of contact should be cleaned and disinfected at a professional cleaning anyway. But when I walk into someone's house, I always look to see just how dirty these are, okay? The other thing I look for is the fingerprints and the marks around this area. And then if there are little kids in the house, I always look kind of like around my knee because that's where little hands tend to run along the walls. I'll never forget, Chad and I moved into a house that had five children living in it previously, and there was like one long Adidas stripe around the whole house because it was just all the kids' handprints. Anyway, if you're a professional cleaner or if you're coming into your home and you want a pair of fresh eyes, look at your walls and points of contact and see what kind of condition they're in. Something else that sticks out like a sore thumb in someone's house is clutter. And the more clutter you have, I mean, the more visually difficult it is to enjoy a space. That's not to be confused with maximalism, which is a decor choice. But if there's a lot of clutter everywhere, it really does feel messy and disorganized. That is an obvious thing. When you walk into your home, you can clearly see the clutter as I can clearly see the clutter in my house. But as a professional cleaner, you would know, okay, I got to tidy before I clean. And this is something that I've been asked so many times. People will say, is it true you need to clean before the cleaning lady shows up? And the thing is, you don't have to clean, but if you get rid of the clutter, it actually saves the cleaning person time so that they can actually clean instead of try to figure out where your stuff is supposed to go or try to make sense of your clutter and try to make it look neater. Really and truly, the more clutter there is, the longer it's going to take to clean a home. So if you want to make your home look clean, one of the quickest ways to do that is to lose the clutter. Two areas I haven't addressed yet, but I would check in any home assessment would be the kitchen and the bathroom. Now, of course, there are things that you're going to do anytime you go in and generally clean these spaces, but how long it's going to take you to clean these spaces really depends on grime and how grimy those surfaces are. And the way I define grime is any kind of film or buildup that's on a surface. So whether it's soap scum in a bathroom, dirt in a sink, grease on a backsplash, splatter on a mirror, you get the idea. That's grime. So if there's a thin or a low amount of grime, I can probably just spray it with a cleaner, give it a minute or two, and wipe it off. That's pretty easy, average. If there's a lot of grime and I'm going to require specialty products or specialty tools or a lot of time to tackle that grime, I would then know to adjust my assessment accordingly. So what I look for specifically are shiny reflective surfaces to be indicators to me of how grimy a room is. Now, the other thing you can do to check for grime, aside from feeling a surface, is to do what I call the eye level test, which I love. It never lies. What you do is you get down to the eye level of that particular surface so that when you look at it, you are looking directly straight on at that surface, and it will tell you what is built up on that surface. When you do the eye level test for the first time, it's like you're seeing things in five dimensions. It is a new experience. And that is going to tell you how greasy or grimy a surface is. Now, if you're looking at a vertical surface, like, say, a refrigerator that's stainless steel, you can use the light again to sort of shift from side to side and see what kind of greasy, grimy fingerprints or buildup exist on that surface. Either way, there are a few different ways that you can assess grime, but grime will definitely inform how long cleaning these two very intensive rooms will take you. So, my hope is that I've given you some insight on how you can assess your own home, some things that professional cleaners would look at if they stepped into your space and wanted to gauge truly how clean or dirty it was, and, of course, what you can do about it. And if I were to come to your house, I wouldn't judge. I would just assess. And that brings me to this week's comment question, which is, if you knew I was coming over, what would you clean? If I knew you were coming to my house, hmm, I'd make sure the garbages were empty because smell is such a big deal for me, and I would also make sure the bathrooms are clean. And then, honestly, I'd probably just apologize for the rest. But let me know what you would do in the comments down below. You can check out our playlist on how to develop better cleaning habits right over here. I think it really flows well from this video. And if you want to support the Clean My Space channel, you can do so by subscribing to it and catching our latest videos, as well as checking out the Makers Clean Store. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.