Cleaning, er, Blessing my House

So, I'm on the FlyLady bandwagon again, and I've stuck with it for a month so far. Today is the last day of my first rotation through all of the "zones" in my house, and the place is looking pretty good. If nothing else, it's gotten me off my butt to do some of those icky jobs that always get put off (cleaning the filters in the kitchen vent fan, washing windows, etc.). The best part about her system is, the longer you stick with it, the less cleaning you have to do each time, because the dirt doesn't accumulate and really stick the way it does if it sits for, oh, say, a couple years. Ahem.

I'm still working out which parts of my house are in which zones, as my housework load doesn't split up evenly if I use her divisions. I pretty much skipped doing anything with the basement, which is disgusting and disorganized and used for nothing other than storage and cat feeding/litter, so it was less important than the areas we look at every day. Today, though, I bought a mop and attempted to bring the cat room up to some level of hygenic decency. Because really, the place was foul.

Good thing it's in a half bathroom, because I had to rinse the mop out every two square feet or so and scrub each section of the floor several times just to get the worst of the cat litter dust up. Ick. As I was scrubbing the layer of grime off of every surface in there (including walls), I was really glad I had decided to switch to a different kind of cat litter.

Since we got the cats we've been using the clay clumping kind, usually the kind for multiple cats, which has more fragrance and clumps harder so it's easier to scoop. While we scoop every day, the box only gets actually dumped and refilled, um, when we move, which is less icky than it sounds because the clumping litter really does suck up everything with the least little bit of moisture in it.

But last week I was reading an article about how clumping cat litter may cause health problems for cats and people, what with cats cleaning themselves and ingesting stuff that clumps so hard when wet that it can actually clog bathroom plumbing. Plus, every time you dump the clay-based litter into the box, a huge cloud of dust comes flying up (hence the mopping of walls today), which I can't imagine is good for Asthma Man to breathe.

While I'm not the type to jump on every health-scare bandwagon, the article makes sense, and my cats do tend to puke rather more often than normal, especially for not-very-hairy cats. If there's an easy change I can make that will reduce the number of times my kid comes running to me screaming "Cat Puke!!!!" I'm all for it. Since there are alternatives to the clay-based litters that still clump but don't seem to cause the health risks of the formulas we'd been using, I decided to give it a try.

We're trying Swheat Scoop, which is made from wheat and looks kinda like something you'd add to your cereal if you were having regularity issues. It has virtually no scent - certainly none of the "look, our litter smells so nice you hardly notice we have cat" smell I'm used to - and there was pretty much no dust when I poured it out. I bought a new litter pan and filled it up with the new litter today, adding a couple cups of the old stuff on top so that the cats would recognize the smell, and it was christened within minutes of being put into service. I cleaned it out this afternoon when I was mopping the floor in the room, and it scooped just as well as the old kind ... so far, so good.

Oh, and I ran the new vacuum over the throw rugs in the basement, and bleeeeechh. I was right to fear it. I don't ever want to see that again, thank you very much.