Hope you had a wonderful Columbus Day weekend!  Even though it’s Tuesday now, it feels like a Monday and Mondays for me means cleaning.

Read more after the jump on what I’ve been doing and two products that are making my life WAY easier.

I’m settling into a get-er-done on Mondays attitude.  Strip the beds first thing and get all the sheets going.  If I don’t get too distracted, I can usually get the towels through as well.

Do a bathroom blitz on the four bathrooms.  Vacuum all around.  I’ll need to add some occasional mopping into the mix.

(Kitchen/dining room cleaning usually happens throughout the day and then more at night.  I may need to add some deep cleaning in at some point, but so far so good.)

So what are these magical products?  First up, our new cordless Dyson.

 

So this bad boy is not cheap, but lemme tell you why it made sense for us and why I think we’re going to get A LOT of use out of it.

So once upon a time, one of my friends told me about a car vacuum cleaner.  You could plug it into the cigarette lighter, and it made it really easy to clean up your car.  Instead of it being a huge hassle to lug your big vacuum out to the car and get the extension cord to get to an outlet or take it to a car wash or gas station with a vacuum, you could just pop in your car vacuum and hit the crumbs.  Easy peasy.  I liked the idea of cleaning more as needed until waiting for the annual car clean out (don’t judge me) that felt insurmountably gross so we would just keep putting it off.  Do you know the stuff that gets under car seats?  I’m pretty sure that’s how penicillin was invented.

Welp, it turns out that not all car vacuums are created equal.  Ours just didn’t have great suction.  We returned it because I knew I’d never use it if it wasn’t doing a great job anyway.  Womp womp.

But we started to think, what if we got a Dyson dust buster?  This could be good in the house and then not too difficult to take to the car.

Fast forward to Malaysia.  Here, we received a vacuum cleaner for use but only until our stuff arrived.  Because our old upright Dyson is sitting in storage, we’d have to get a new one.

Instead of getting a US one where we’d have to worry about burning out the motor using the transformer much less lugging it around the house OR buying a local one that we might not be able to use later, we started thinking cordless again.  It could charge on the transformer and we could use it here or in the future.

My main hesitation was on battery life.  In Italy, we tried buying a better vacuum because I loathed ours, but it didn’t work out.  We did a cordless, but it was disappointing on two fronts.  First, the suction wasn’t great.  Then to add insult to injury, the battery life was almost nonexistent.  You couldn’t even finish a room before it died.  So it went back.  Womp womp.

BUT Dyson came out with a newer (more expensive) model that boasts excellent battery life.  I believe it is 7 minutes on high suction or 40 minutes for regular.  I can work with that.

So we tried it.  And we love it.

There’s a lot of engineering that went into this product.  The pieces are super easy to exchange.  Want to pop on a different brush head?  It’s really simple.  The head swivels in a way that makes it easy to get right up to the baseboard and move around.  It’s bagless, so it’s easy to dump and easy to clean the pieces.

Battery life has been great.  I haven’t given it a full test run because I like to vacuum in sections (carpet and hardwood at different times),but I think I could vacuum the whole house on one charge.  It’s pretty fantastic.

I like that it’s not a whole to do to pull the thing out.  Instead of sweeping in the evening, we’ve just been running this bad boy over the kitchen and dining room floors.  Also, I love that it’s multipurpose.  I can pause in my vacuuming to switch the brush head and then vacuum off Mac’s booster.

Is it heavy?  Not really.  It took me a little bit to get used to, but I find it easier to switch hands than with a regular vacuum.  (Henry, the five year old, can use it himself.)  It does feel a little bit strange that you have to keep the trigger pressed to make it run.  But this made me quickly realize that there are lots of times that you don’t need the thing to be running the whole time.  When I’m sliding some furniture over.  Moving locations.  All that jazz.

So I know this reads like a giant advertisement, but I love this thing so very much.  Cost per use I’m hoping will end up being very low because it should last for awhile and because it does so much.  Having a vacuum, dust buster, and car vacuum all in one is swell.

The other thing I’m digging?  My Norwex.

 

You may have heard about this product that is threaded with silver to be naturally antibacterial.  Like to kill 99% of grossness with using any cleaning product.

I was late to the game, and the product wasn’t on my radar until I asked a friend with glowing skin what she did.  She admitted that she only scrubbed her face with a Norwex at night.  No product.

It still took me over a year to try it out (and I still haven’t gotten to my face), but I’m definitely hooked.

First, I like that you don’t need product.  I’m trying to transition to less chemicals around us generally.  This helps.

Second, I like that it cuts down on waste.  I’ve fallen into using a lot of Clorox wipes.  I feel bad that generate a lot of waste, but they do get me cleaning so . . . This way, I’ve got a reusable cloth to use again and again.  This should save money in the long run as well.  Norwex cloths aren’t cheap, but they should be cheaper than buying lots of products.

Third, I just find them easier to use than cleaning with a sponge.  It’s a nice, big absorbent cloth.  I can wipe bigger areas.  I can wipe without getting water everywhere.  I feel like I’m doing more with each swipe.  I’m not explaining it well at all, but I just find them to be a lot easier to use than sponges.

Right now I have a kitchen cloth, a fruit/veggie cloth, and a general purpose one that I’ve been using for the bathrooms.  (I haven’t been using them for dusting yet, but they should work well for this too.)  I can definitely see my collection growing and getting plenty of use.

So that’s what is working for me right now?  Have you tried these?  What are the favorites in your cleaning arsenal?

This post contains affiliate links.   Thanks for supporting Roman Reboot!