A green sweep

We all have strategies for keeping house.

Cheryl Daniels, a mother of four young children and co-owner of The Cleaning Supplier, tries to do a little cleaning every day. That way she's never overwhelmed. "You can't do it all at once," she said during an interview at her janitorial supply store in Sandy. She pays particular attention to the bathrooms. "I try to wipe down the sinks and toilets every other day rather than wait and let them get really dirty."

Heidi Romrell is vice president of Dawes Janitorial Inc., which cleans the public areas of the Governor's Mansion. "It's an absolutely beautiful place to work," she said in a phone interview. Her company considers it a crown jewel in its list of clients.

Applying paste-wax to the woodwork and buffing it to a high shine, which they do twice a year, is among their labor-intensive work at the mansion. But Romrell uses green cleaning techniques at the mansion that will work for any of us.

"I often try to research natural cleaning solutions that are highly effective but not caustic to the skin," she said. "We use vinegar to remove hard-water spots from metal surfaces and lemon juice to polish brass."

They clean silver by placing aluminum foil in the bottom of a sink and filling it with hot water. They add equal parts baking soda and salt and then put in the silver. "As long as the silver is in contact with the foil, it will draw the tarnish off," she said.

For windows she recommends putting a few drops of Joy dishwashing liquid into water and then cleaning the windows with a squeegee. "It's streak-free."

But the trump card in environmentally sensitive cleaning equipment is a steam cleaner. It's highly effective for washing down grout, walls and getting rid of carpet stains, she said. "The money you save on chemicals is amazing, and it cuts down on the cleaning time."

Julie Sorenson Stanger learned about housekeeping from her grandmother, who came to Utah from Germany in 1953 with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. "She was a poor German immigrant who cleaned homes for many wealthy doctors. She was a master cleaner." Stanger said. "Oma, that's what I call her, believed in cleaning everything with your hands. The best quality and most economical cleaning comes with a simple bucket, water, ammonia and rags and getting down on your hands and knees and scrubbing," she said.