Day 5-Dining Room

Day 5: Dining Room

Clean up any dishes and give a cursory wipe down to the table and sweep up crumbs, then get started on the heavy duty stuff.

Before turning on the lights, wipe them down, I accidently dusted mine with a synthetic duster and ended up burning stuff on to the bulbs!  Dust and/or wipe down with a cleaning solution or water. 15 minutes.

If you have a hutch or china cabinet start there-dust the entire thing, wiping up any spots you may find, clean windows if your hutch has them. Evaluate if anything can be gotten rid of, especially linens. Do you really need 6 round, white tablecloths?  Pick your favorites and make sure all of them fit in the space you have allocated for table cloths.  Wipe down the front, sides & legs-being in the dining room it may have gotten some food splatters somewhere along the way. 30-45 minutes

If you have a window or sliding door, wipe all around the casing, then use your toothbrush, vinegar and a cloth to clean the slider at the bottom. It’s probably gross. I don’t know about you but I only clean mine at spring cleaning!  After getting the gunk out, wash the windows-inside and if you can get out there, may as well do the outside too, or you can wait until it’s time to do outside stuff. 15-25 minutes

Take your cloth, scrubber and cleaner and wash down the table-underneath, the legs, the top , the SIDES which are often missed when we are wiping up after dinner.  Do the same to the chairs, turn the chairs over, use a tooth brush (I had to use a butter knife with a towel over it to get in some of the crannies where the seat met the chair wood).  I would recommend getting as much stuff off of them without taking them apart as possible so you don’t strip the screws if yours have them.  Do any need gluing?  You can do it now or you can put it on your fix it list (after spring cleaning, you can tackle the fix it list).  My mom had a great suggestion-use just a little bit of gorilla glue and use a rope to tie around the chair part being glued, then twist around a stick or something to cinch it tight.  30-45 minutes (fyi, you could watch a TV show or something while doing this J

Next wash down your walls… that spaghetti the kids dropped a month ago that you cleaned off the floor? Yeah, it’s still on the wall!  I personally have the added fun of washing down a banister that looks down into our playroom.  Dust any pictures or decorations in the room on the wall or furniture.  Clean up any other furniture in the room 5-30 minutes depending how much you have in your dining room.

Next move the table aside (you may need help to do this) and if you have an area rug move it to the living room and use a steam cleaner on it after vacuuming it (or schedule steam cleaning for the end and have it done then). If you just have bare floor or you don’t have an area rug, vacuum and steam clean (or schedule) if you have carpet-if you have hard flooring do as you did in the kitchen-get out your scrubber, toothbrush, cleaner and cloth and get scrubbing.  After the floor and any area rugs have dried put it all back together and enjoy your clean dining room! 30 minutes