Survival Spring Clean
A gentleman’s home may be his castle, but a mum has to make do with living in her car. And as for her castle? Mine definitely isn’t. Kit Perkins on why her second home is her car...
Car-Tastrophe! W
hether visiting relatives, ferrying kids to and from school and various clubs and activities, the time we spend on the road all adds up.
Our cars become a mobile
office, taxi, and the kids’ canteen. A quick make-up fix in the brutally honest mirror (depressing, but good for an eyebrow plucking sesh) and then we’re off again, to the next football match or dance lesson. On long journeys, Mum rides shotgun while Dad drives. Mum gets the short straw; she’s a mobile vending machine, dishing out pens and paper and snacks, occasionally hand-feeding the driver. It’s not surprising that our cars get messy; it’s hard work keeping on top of things. I am still traumatised from a recent car clean- ing adventure. My son posted the iPod in between the car seats so it fell underneath. After ripping the seats apart, we found the iPod, glistening amongst a treasure trove of marbles, watches, toy cars…oh, and several years’ worth of mouldy snacks (not all ours – the car was bought second-hand!) A combination of dropping more snacks on the seat than he put in his mouth, plus leaving the window open on a damp autumn night, resulted in a microbiological rainforest that would have presented Rentokil with a major challenge. The horror! Other unrecognisable objects, most of which be- longed in a lab, needed the skills of a forensic expert; suited, booted and masked up to the max. But no, there was just me, with a pair of rubber gloves and a bucket of bubbles and bleach.
I never want to go through such an ordeal on that scale again. But it’s so easy to descend back into
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chaos and after all that effort, how do you keep the car in an acceptable state? Well, a good start is to give the car a complete va- let. I recently tested a range of car cleaning products by Holts and Simoniz, and was genuinely surprised by the range of cleaning solutions in their car care kit. They have certainly tried to think of a solution to every eventuality – for more details and car care tips by the experts themselves, please read the pages directly after these!
Once you’ve got the car as close to that ‘brand new’ feeling again, I’ve come up with a few tools to help fight the constant battle against kiddie grub and muck. Here’s how you can make sure your car spring clean lasts longer than a week:
Ban food in the car
Controversial, yes, but when you’ve scraped up some foodstuff that is more furry mould than actual food, you may keep that in mind when you’re about to give in to demands!
Boxes
Good for containing random toys and child parapher- nalia. I’ve also placed a plastic basket with scrap paper and pens within easy reach. Top tip – don’t ever let them have stickers in the car, unless you’re prepared to spend hours soaking them off the windows.
Kitchen roll
Always good for general spillage, and for big globules of (what I hope is) mud, which tends to get scraped along the inside of the door (how do they DO that?!) Finish off with a Jumbo Upholstery Wipe which are suitable for all types of car interior. They are quite
Plastic boxes & baskets are a great way of keeping things tidy
foamy but that’s a good thing; they certainly do the trick. My car came up spotless.
Carrier bags Despite my growing collection of Bags for Life, I still have a never-ending supply of carrier bags. I reuse them to collect random rubbish just before I get out of the car each night. You can even invest in a couple of plastic boxes for each foot well if the children are still small. Children make mess, it’s unavoidable. But they can be coerced into throwing rubbish into a bin, if you make a game of it.
By having plastic bags and wipes to hand, you can make the most of dead time, those five minutes before you pick the kids up from school, or if you’re stuck in stationary traffic for a while.
And next time you take an extra passenger in the
car, they won’t have to sit with their knees up around their ears, to avoid treading on junk in the foot wells. They won’t feel like they’re in a tractor at the Glaston- bury Festival. And you will all feel a little more relaxed from the moment you get into the car.
You could call it Instant Car-ma.
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