The Top 10 Cleaning Secrets Parents Know (and You Should Know, Too!)
I’m not saying I didn’t know how to clean before I had kids, but I am admitting that my typical approach to cleaning involved hastily dusting nearby surfaces with a random sock I found on the floor. Once I became a parent, I had to get more realistic about household cleaning, and that meant onboarding some strategies for both daily cleaning and tackling life’s inevitable messes.
The folks at Cubby have a seemingly endless number of cleaning tips and hacks up their sleeves to make these everyday tasks more manageable. These are the top 10 cleaning secrets parents (and non-parents!) should know.
Keep Bathroom Stains Away
Even if you happen to keep a fastidiously clean bathroom (must be nice!), if you have hard water, your toilet could develop gross brown-ish hard water stains. Getting rid of these eyesores is no easy feat, but fortunately Cara Strickland found an unexpected ingredient that provided a supereffective solution for removing hardwater stains.
Read: I Tried Everything to Fix the Brown Hard Water Stains in My Toilet — Then I Finally Found a Solution!
If you notice stains in the bathtub, don’t freak out. Cubby contributor Shifrah Combiths has a handy guide to removing everything from soap scum to mold. She breaks down stains by color to determine what they might be and the best way to get rid of them.
Read: How to Get Rid of Those Stains in Your Bathtub
Tackle That Mountain of Laundry
As the steward of my family’s laundry, I often like to remind my kids that “laundry knows no quitting time.” As long as we wear clothes, we’ve got laundry to do. And as a mother of two (and, frankly, as a messy eater), I’m no stranger to stains, and I’m always looking for a way to get grease out of clothes, so I definitely bookmarked this article by Meleyna Nomura, which breaks down exactly how to tackle grease stains so you can save your favorite garments for another wear.
Read: The Tricks I Use to Get Food Grease Stains Out of Clothes
Spring and summer bring their own variety of stains and laundry situations. If an outfit comes back clean from summer camp, I raise a skeptical eyebrow. I’m much more used to seeing them smeared with paint or mud stains. Luckily I now know how to tackle mud stains, thanks to another article from Nomura, a baseball mom with years of practice removing grass stains from little white pants.
Read: I’m a Baseball Mom, and Have Scrubbed Hundreds of Pants — Here’s How to Get Mud Stains Out of Clothes
If we’re not at camp, we’re at the pool, which means I’m always laundering bathing suits, and by July, they start looking a little worse for the wear. Here, Combiths details how to keep swimsuits sparkling clean, whether you wash by hand (preferred method) or in the washing machine (more likely).
Read: This is How I Keep My Family’s Swimsuits Clean So They Last All Summer
Keep Walls and Furniture Free from Unwanted “Art”
Living with kids and pets doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have nice things; it just means that sometimes those nice things might get scribbled on. You don’t need to give up on those household luxuries. You just need to know the secret tricks to get crayon off the walls, pee stains off of a mattress, permanent marker off of the sofa, or nail polish off your bathroom floor (it’s actually a really cool trick!).
Maybe you just need a solution that can tackle practically any stain in any location. Cubby’s got something for that, too.