It was a productive weekend. My steam jet cleaner which I had bought from Ebay arrived. It's shaped like a canister vacuum cleaner with a little brush on the end of the hose. You fill it with water and instead of sucking air it produces a blast of steam.
I had originally wanted a smaller hand-held one, but after reading some customer reviews online I decided the canister would be better. Because for one thing, even though the hand-held is smaller and lighter, you have to carry the whole thing. So it ends up being heavier than the canister model while you're working. Also I read the hand-held ones run out of steam really fast because the water resevoir is comparatively small.
So like I said, I got one of the big ones. My main reason for getting it was to clean the stove top. I want our new stove to stay nice, but it's really difficult to remove stains from under the burners without scratching the enamel. To be honest I was disappointed in the steam cleaner's work on the stove. I guess I was too much expecting "as seen on TV" performance. You know, aim the steam jet in the general direction of the stain and it magically vanishes. Well it wasn't like that! It was slightly better than the scrubby pad at getting the cooked-on grease off under the burners, but they're still not really clean.
It was a lot better in the bathroom, especially on the grout. But still I needed just as much elbow grease as I would have with a scrub brush. I think the real advantage of the steam cleaner is not that it's so much easier, but that you don't need to use chemical cleaners. Which is really nice. I had been putting off cleaning the bathroom because I hate spraying that Tilex stuff in such a small space. It's hard to scrub tile when your eyes are watering and you can't breathe.
For household cleaning, so far I'm pretty "meh" about the steam cleaner. However, it turns out to be a godsend for cleaning my car. Those little plastic toys have all kinds of crevices and shapes where grime collects. I was pretty much resigned to them never being shiny clean again, but the steam cleaner does a pretty good job of it! It's time consuming work, attacking the grime on each one of those little toys. Yesterday I quit after using up the 48 oz. water tank twice. I still have the roof and the trunk to do, and by the time I was done my hands were cramped and numb. I think I might wrap some padding around the nozzle to make it easier to grip.
The steam cleaner worked so well on the toys, I think I'm going to use it to clean the chrome on my car right before we leave for Houston. I wish I could take it with us, to get rid of the travel grime after we get there. But I don't think there will be room in the car for it.
Besides making a serious dent in cleaning the car exterior, this past weekend I also took my laptop in for service (which I already wrote about), made the muslin for my party dress for the Art Car Ball, bought a "Stress Relief Yoga" DVD for relaxing after driving days during the trip, and got to work on posting from my phone. Text posts work great, but the photos are being rejected for some reason. I'm going to try Mfop2's support (I can't believe he offers support on a free service. I'm going to make a donation if it works). And if it doesn't work, I'm going to try another solution called pop2blog that would run off my own server. That might be better because then I could manipulate the photos however I wanted before posting them.
What else? Well I also had a highly successful thrift shopping trip with Lisa, went to a gallery opening Saturday night with Georg, and he set up the compost bin on Sunday while I was cleaning my car. Yay! We're eco-friendly!
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