Wednesday, March 25, 2009

WFMW ~ Washing windows using a squeegee

I thought I would share my favorite way to get clean, lint free and streak free windows. (But please don't expect mine to always be that way because they aren't. I have 4 young children and it seems as soon as I wash the windows they are looking out with their hands on them. But that's okay, I would far rather have my children (and visiting children) than have clean windows!)

Growing up when we would wash windows we would spray the cleaner on and then use a rag to wipe and wipe and try to get it nice and clean and attempt to not leave any lint while we were at it. (We didn't then and I still don't use paper towels, it uses so many and seems incredibly wasteful!)

When I was a teen I started working for some friends who owned a ServiceMaster company. The first job that I helped with was washing all the windows at our town's University. That was thousands of windows so we needed to be efficient.

Here is how we did it:
  1. Spray the cleaner on, but not a ton of it. You only need about 5 sprays, 1 in each corner and one in the middle.
  2. Using a wet "scratch" pad rub it around all over scrubbing off any dirty spots.
  3. Then using your squeegee (and this is the trick that really helps to make cleaning efficient ) start at the very top and pull it across to the other side (at the angle shown in the picture below), quickly wipe the blade off with your rag and do it again, continue with this until you get to the bottom. Then take your squeegee and make one pass down the side where you were pulling over too (because it is hard to pull over completely to the edge without still leaving some moisture).
  4. Then take your rag and wipe up the moisture that has drained to the bottom of your window.

That's it! It really is quick and efficient and makes me think that maybe I had better go wash windows today! :-)

Using a squeegee really works for me!

Quick note: When buying a squeegee make sure the rubber blade is pretty flexible, some of the cheap ones are basically plastic and they don't hardly work at all!

If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments. Don't forget to head over to "We are THAT family" for more "Works for me Wednesday".


1 comment:

Moore Minutes said...

PERFECT idea! I'm excited about this. Thank you for sharing.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin