Cleaning kitchen cabinets

Some house cleaning jobs are harder than others. One of the biggest is cleaning the kitchen cabinets. The reason that the job is so big is that cooking produces grease. This grease sticks to all the surfaces in your kitchen. The grease, in turn, attracts dust particles and now we have a really big greasy, dusty mess.

How you go about cleaning this greasy, dusty mess is in a large part determined by the material that your cabinets are made out of. Wooden cabinets have to be treated differently than Formica ones. You need to treat your wood as you would any wooden piece of furniture. That doesn’t mean that you can just give them a spray of furniture polish and be done with it, however.

Depending on how green you are being, you will either place a kitchen cleaning cleaner or white vinegar into a pail of warm water. You can use a sponge or a soft rag to wash first the inside of your cabinet. This will allow you to test whether or not washing them will damage the wood in any way. There are special cleaners like Murphy’s Wood Soap which is made especially for wooden furniture and floors.

If your cabinets are Formica, metal or another material, you may find that streaks are more of an issue than they are with wood. You will need to wipe them dry with a straight even stroke a lot like when you are cleaning your windows.

You will need to use a ladder to clean the upper cabinets. After you have determined that your cleaner is safe for your cabinet you can start from the top and wipe down the cabinets. You may have to rinse your rag or sponge and wipe more than once to get all the grease and dust off. Use a clean dry rag or chamois to wipe the cabinets dry. If the wood is untreated you may want to use a cream wood treatment to make your cabinets shine and resist the grease and dust for a little longer.

If the grease is very tough to get off you may have to resort to a little more than just a quick wipe. Using a non-abrasive plastic scrubber may help to get into groves and the hardest hit areas around the handles. Be very careful not to damage the finish on your cabinets.

The handles of your cabinets need to be cleaned separately. Wash the surface around them carefully and then you can treat them with a metal cleaner depending on what they are made of. This can be brass or chrome or many other finishes.

Cleaning your cabinets is a big job. If you want to cut down on the amount of work all at one time you can make wiping down one or two part of your regular weekly cleaning.