Cleaning cloths should be boiled in strong soap suds, rinsed, and thoroughly dried before putting away. This is a difficult rule to enforce, for it is a temptation to tuck such things away where they will not show. Watch this matter as you do the garbage pail. When a cloth is too dirty to wash clean, burn it or send it away with paper refuse.
Cleaning materials.—Air, sunshine, and water are the great purifiers, plus muscular energy or the power of machinery, but we frequently use chemical aids. These should all be kept in stock.
Soaps and alkalies.—White and yellow soap, some washing powder, sal soda, caustic soda, household ammonia. Buy these in quantities if you have room to store them, and if they will not be used too lavishly because the supply is large. The soap is not much cheaper by the box, but it hardens with age, and then it wastes less rapidly when used.
Oils and polishes.—Crude oil, kerosene, a mixture of linseed oil, vinegar, and turpentine, one part each, cottonseed oil, alcohol.
Acids.—A solution of oxalic acid marked poison. Vinegar is on hand among kitchen supplies.
Gritty substances.—Rotten stone, whiting, some gritty soap of a kind that does not scratch, a gritty powder, or fine sand for coarse work.
Disinfectant and deodorizers.—A weak solution of carbolic acid
marked poison, chloride of lime, or some reliable preparation[26] (though these are rather expensive), rock salt, and coarse common salt.
Methods of cleaning.—We must first consider what the substance is that has to be removed. The fabrics and upholstery used in furnishing catch dust which contains lint, grit, organic material from our bodies, and bacteria. Fabrics also become spotted (see next chapter). The walls and ceilings, floors and cracks, catch dust. All wood and glass surfaces become soiled from the touch of even clean fingers, and the moisture of the air mixed with dust dulls them. Metal surfaces oxidize, and this oxidized layer must be rubbed off.
To clean fabrics.—If you live in a suburb or in the country, brush, shake, and beat articles to be cleaned out of doors, noticing the way of the wind that the dust may not be carried back into the house.