I Tried This Pro Cleaner’s Cleaning Rag Trick, and It Saved Me So Much Time

Writing about cleaning has exposed me to not only new products and methods, but also different ways of looking at things that I already do. For instance, I’ve always scrubbed my sink nightly with a powdered cleanser, but I recently realized that adding the step of degreasing is key to a truly shiny sink. So now I load my cleaning sponge with soap and give the sink a sudsy bath before scouring it with Bar Keepers Friend, which gets into the grooves of stainless steel to lift ground-in grime. 

A few weeks ago, I watched a video by pro cleaner Brandon Pleshek of Clean That Up that also made me re-examine two cleaning habits that I’ve always practiced without much thought. First, the importance of never using a dirty rag on clean items. And second, the practice of folding rags to clean rather than using them scrunched up.

In the video, Pleshek uses the toilet as an example. He shares that when cleaning the toilet, he likes to fold his towel in two, which gives him four different sides to clean with. Once one’s dirty, he’ll flip it over and have another clean side to keep going. 

I had always folded my rags once over to give myself as much clean surface area as possible and used separate rags for the clean and dirty parts of a cleaning task. This new take allows me to be more deliberate about folding and flipping my rags and use less of them overall, which in turns cuts down on the time and energy spent washing, folding, and putting them away. So not only am I cleaning more efficiently in the moment, but also afterward when I’m finishing up.

And to take it one step further, if I fold my rag completely inside-out once all the initial outside surfaces are dirty, then I can take it from having four surfaces to work with to eight instead.

This may seem like a small change, but every tweak that adds efficiency to tasks I perform perpetually adds up, eventually, to hours of saved time. From now on, I will purposefully fold my cleaning rags, for several thoughtful reasons, every time I clean.