Earth Week Challenge 2020: Spring Clean Saturday

Saturday's challenge for Earth Week is the second one that's been revised to make it quarantine-friendly. It was originally meant to be "Shop Green Saturday," about supporting local businesses with your shopping dollars — something I only wish I could do right now. (I did the best I could by ordering online from the businesses that had Web stores, but there's only so many things I can usefully purchase that way.) Since visiting most local businesses is out, the challenge has been rebranded as "Spring Clean Saturday": "Spring clean your home with sustainability in mind. Find ways you can green and simplify your home and purchases for the future."

On one level, this isn't much of a challenge for me, because I do practically all my cleaning with a rag and a spray bottle of vinegar and water. The only commercial cleaning products Brian and I buy regularly are dish soap, laundry detergent, and oxygen bleach (which I use not for laundry but to clean the toilet, since our flushable walnut cat litter has a tendency to stain the porcelain). The challenging part, for me, would be finding the time to do a genuine, thorough "spring cleaning." In theory, I should be able to take advantage of all this "extra time" we supposedly have as a result of being home all the time, but somehow mine has never materialized. Even though I no longer spend five hours a week recruiting volunteers for the Troubadour or three hours a week traveling to and participating in Morris dance practice, the time has all been eaten up by a combination of other projects (like trying to organize two RPGs over Zoom), frantic news-reading to keep up with the latest COVID developments, and sheer psychological exhaustion.

So cleaning my entire house from top to bottom was definitely not on the agenda. But I happened to have one cleaning task on my list aside from the weekly sweeping and bathroom cleanups: cleaning the stemware rack in the kitchen. This was one of my favorite birthday presents from Brian, but it has one problem: situated as it is near the stove, it tends to accumulate a grimy film of oil and dust, and because the top of it is over my head, I don't usually see it and remember to clean it. So I only notice it when I happen to touch the surface, as I did yesterday, and go, "Ick!"

This was a job my usual vinegar-and-water mix definitely couldn't handle, so I pulled out another green cleaning product from our collection that doesn't get used as often: Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day, an all-purpose spray that comes in a variety of scents. We bought this to clean the painted walls next to the stove, which also tend to accumulate oil spatter, and it did just okay at that job; however, on the wood of the stemware rack, it fared much better. Simply spraying it on and wiping it off was all it took, as you can see in this picture. (The right side has been wiped, the left has not.) It was so easy, I went ahead and cleaned off the top of the microwave and the range hood as well while I was at it.

So that's my spring-cleaning task for today. Maybe I'll get around to tackling the rest of the house when I have fewer other things to worry about.