My smart husband and a smart "how to do" housecleaning shortcut

Maybe a better title for this post would be, "If we didn't entertain, we would live in utter filth."   One of my mother-in-law's good friends used to say that and I've adopted it as my motto!! How true! How true!! (by the way, the lady is in her 80's and has been saying that phrase for a long time . . .I just looked "utter filth" up in urban dictionary and it doesn't mean the same thing anymore - we are going with the old definition here -  meaning nasty house)  We hosted a party in our home last night (at some point I am sure that I will blog about it) and we've been cleaning and "fixing up" the house for weeks.  I wanted to share a trick with y'all!!

We have hardwood floors and we don't have rugs because of my allergies.  We keep felt pads on the bottom of our chair legs so they don't scratch the floors as they are scooted all around.  We usually buy sheets of adhesive backed felt in the craft department and change it often.  We've found it actually works better than the felt pads in the furniture section (and much cheaper!!).  There is a problem though . . .as you scoot chairs around they pick up dust and hair and whatever on those little felt pads and after a while... it looks like the bottom of the chair legs have little beards growing from them.

Mark placed a blanket on the floor and flipped some chairs over for me to begin working.  I had my new piece of felt and my scissors.  We looked at the felt and realized it wasn't worn at all, it was only "dusty and hairy."  Mark disappeared for a moment.  Where was he?  He went into the other room to get the lint roller.  He said, "just try it."

You can see how gross the pads become - little dust bunnies houseslippers attached to the bottom of each leg - but these aren't cute bunny houseslippers!!!!

Wanna see a close up?

Lint roller, hmmmmm?  Will it work?  Mark might just be the smartest man alive.  Could he be right?

LOOK AT THAT!!  Those felt pads look brand new!!!!

Look what is trapped on the lint roller!  YUCK!!!!!!  I think of us as "clean" people but it never ceases to amaze me how much dirt and dust and yuck and muck we can drag into our house each week. (plus we have a cat!!)

Hope this little trick helps some of you! Mark is indeed a smart man! A project that usually takes at least an hour . . .pull off the old sticky pads, cut new ones, stick new ones on . . .took just a few seconds and viola' - they looked brand new.

How about you? Do you have a wonderful housekeeping short cut to share? I'd love to hear. Just this last week I called my friend, Linda, and said, "How do you clean the very top of the cabinets?" We've been in this house 20 years - surely I have cleaned them before. I had to wear my dust mask. I crawled up there (onto the lower cabinets - which of course, then I had to disinfect) and sprayed down the top of the cabinets with lemon oil and wiped them up with paper towels . . .and then went back and did it again the next day. They aren't spotless but they are cleaner than they have been . . .probably since they were new!!! I painted all the spindles on our front porch - wrought iron and wooden . . . cleaned the walk through basement door and door from the deck with a Mr. Clean magic eraser . . . all in the name of love :-) If we didn't entertain, we would live in utter filth. Yep! How about you?