Complete Idiot's Guide to Cleaning

I found this book to be very interesting. It has many great tips on cleaning and keeping your home neat and healthy. There are lots of recipes for having a green household. I would recommend it.

Housecleaning professionals and stay-at-home moms alike will benefit from the great tips in this book. Even Mother Earth will thank you!

I thought the book was splendid and would recommend it to anyone from housecleaning professionals to stay-at-home moms. Mary's expert insight into the world of cleaning is incredible and throughly helpful in any and all cleaning situations. She deals with everything from pet problems to stains to dust and dirt and that just scratches the surface. If youre looking for environmentally helpful tips then this is also definitely the book for you. Mary has a great love for nature and it comes out in her advice. She leans much towards using environmetally friendly products which to me is a huge plus. One way or another find a way to get this book into your hands. It will make your cleaning much simpler and stress free!

I was looking forward to reading Mary Findley and Linda Formichelli's "Complete Idiot's Guide to Cleaning" in the hopes that it might provide some cleaning solutions that didn't require either serious scrubbing or harsh, toxic chemicals--things that don't go well with my tendonitis and allergies. That, of course, is a tall order, and one that I didn't really expect the book to fulfill. However, it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Mary Findley is a huge proponent of safe, non-toxic, biodegradable cleaning solutions using, when possible, everyday easy-to-find supplies. Of course, I figured there'd be a price for this. After all, why would people make and buy expensive, harsh, dangerous chemicals if things you could make out of vinegar, water, and a couple of other everyday ingredients could do as good a job? That's where the real shock came in. There's one all-purpose solution Mary recommends that involves water with a bit of vinegar and all-natural dish soap that knocks my socks off. Our stovetop was in pretty sad shape and I was sure it was going to take a ton of scrubbing to get it clean. I sprayed this stuff on, let it sit, then wiped it off with a terrycloth towel. And the gunk came right off with it. Other solutions have been equally effective. The product she recommends to clean pet messes out of carpets left me unable to tell where my cat had thrown up on our *white* carpet, and again, it's all-natural, safe, and doesn't involve scrubbing. My kitchen sink has never gleamed so well, and now that the water deposits have been cleaned out of our showerhead the water pressure is noticeably better and more even. I don't have to obsess over whether or not any tiny bits of cleanser might have sprayed or dripped somewhere that the cats could get to. My only issue with the products she recommends is that I had trouble finding a few of them. While many are everyday things such as baking soda, white vinegar, all-natural dish soap, and so on, some are more specialized--such as a 20% hydrogen peroxide solution. Unfortunately that one product is involved in her one recommendation for mildew, which (living in a humid region) I have a particular interest in. While many of the products she recommends can be purchased all at once from her own online store, she's good about recommending other sources and I never once felt as though I was being advertised to (and I can be fairly picky about such things). It does cost a bit at first (you are, after all, replacing nearly every cleaning supply in your house, most likely), but most of these materials are much cheaper to replace or last much longer than store-bought chemicals, making them cheaper in the long run. The scope of this book is formidable. Whether you need to clean blinds or curtains, siding or gutters, your bathtub, carpets, hardwood, wood furniture, kitchen counters, or whatever, you'll probably find it in here. There are a few corner-case exceptions (she covers nearly every type of house sidin