CLEAN in 2011: Have You SEEN Your Kitchen Cabinets?

If you’ve taken a look at April’s Cleaning Calendar (available in the right sidebar), then you know that this week I’m doing some deep cleaning in the kitchen, working on some areas that are often neglected.  Yesterday, I wiped down my kitchen cabinets.

I spend tons of time in the kitchen, but I just wasn’t seeing just how dirty they were!  Yes, I saw them, but I wasn’t really SEEING them.  I see the fingerprints on the fridge, the clutter on the counters, and the crumbs on the stovetop, but the cabinets?  I don’t usually give them a second thought.  As result, they rarely get wiped down.

So as a result, I’ve been walking around my kitchen, blind to the fact that my beautiful cabinets really look like this:

See all those spots and drips and dust?  Yikes!

I was more than a little leery about cleaning my cabinets this week.  The last time I wiped them down (and I’m going to plea the 5th on when exactly that occurred!), I used some disposable wood cleaner cloths that left them looking very streaky (and The Picky Apple was NOT happy about it!).  As a result, I had to go back and wipe them down again to get rid of the streaks.

So I went in to this round of cabinet cleaning with a bit of trepidation.  I decided to give one my new favorite products a try, Shaklee’s Basic H2 Organic Super Cleaning Concentrate.  This is such a versatile, cost effective product, and maybe I’ll talk about it in more detail sometime soon.  I’m not receiving any kind of kickbacks for saying that, I just really love the stuff.  (Though if you sell Shaklee and are interested in sponsoring The Picky Apple, let me know!!)  If you remember, I used Basic H2 for cleaning my bathroom mirrors.  For cleaning my kitchen cabinets, I used the All Purpose Solution, which is just 1/4 tsp H2 mixed with 16 oz. water.

It took me about 30-45 minutes to thoroughly wipe down my cabinets (23 in all) and drawer fronts and really get all of those yucky spots off.  I have no idea what it all was.  Milk explosion?  Blender explosion?  Grease from cooking?  Spills from baking?  Probably a little bit of everything.

But the H2 did the trick, and left my cabinets looking clean without any streaks:

So much better, don’t you think?

Now on to my refrigerator coils, another neglected task…..

How often do you wipe down your kitchen cabinets?  Have you really taken a close look at them lately?