Possibly sensing that spring cleaning is on the agenda, my girls have been hard at work making sure I have enough to keep me busy. I can just imagine them conspiring:
“This place is immaculate – I could eat off the floor.”
“And look at her, sitting there with her laptop, eating Twiglets, having showered. Has the concept of motherhood eluded her?”
“And she’s only lost it once today.”
“When you sat on my head till you could no longer hear my cries.”
“Let’s get her, and good.”
And so they took permanent marker to the windows and painted the oak coffee table with nail varnish. They got busy with my mascara and a white bedspread, had a perfume war (an old family tradition) and squeezed ice-blue shaving cream into the upholstery. Meanwhile, the toilet-trained toddler with an aversion to napping started falling asleep everywhere and losing control of her faculties. Now ours smells like the home of a senile cat with poor bladder control – but excellent taste in cosmetics.
Luckily there are some great websites devoted to people whose houses are ruled by high-strung imps with little patience for interior design. DIYnot.com, for instance, covers the gamut of household disasters – damage from chemicals in hair dye and plasticine, which I expect to face any day now, to stains and stench from blood and vomit, which I face most days. It’s got several tricks up its proverbial sleeve, like methylated spirits (which, I confess, I had to look up), lighter fluid, ice cubes and – my favourite – dry-cleaning. To remove nail varnish from wood it recommends, simply, nail varnish remover (non-oily), though Wiki.Answers.com says over its dead body should the two make contact, suggesting mineral spirits instead (another Google search).
Ehow.com, however, would be nowhere without nail varnish remover, and recommends it for the marker-on-windows fiasco.
Mumsnet.com, naturally, hosts some excellent chats on housekeeping (I say “naturally” because, let’s not kid ourselves, this is what mums spend 99 per cent of their day doing). Visit if, like me, you’re having a wee dilemma, or planning a birthday party during which you intend to offer sustenance or amusement of any kind. I’d think twice.
But speaking of wee, it truly is the bane of our expert panel. Howtocleananything.com offers various solutions, ranging in effectiveness depending on the depth, literally, of the problem: household cleaners, steam cleaners, even dry cleaners may not do the trick. So watch where you lay your bloated, juice-quaffing kid once he’s dropped off wearing nothing but a pair of Bob the Builder pants. As they say: “Unless there is a way for you to remove the urine-infected materials from inside the upholstery and thoroughly clean the inside structure of the upholstery, I would suggest you throw it away and get a new one.”
Ellen Himelfarb is a freelance writer and mother of two. You can reach her at ellen.h@mac.com
