Art & Antiques: Cleaning tips to protect your valuables

I met a client during an in-home appraisal evaluation session who had raised six sons in a house with a pristine, fragile, and very valuable collection of antique glassware. Her ability to have boys share a house with fragile stemware prompted me to share my tips for protecting your valuables.

Valuable objects undefined art, antiques, and collectibles undefined have to live in a stable environment to remain in good condition. Here are some tips for keeping your home and your stuff in tip top, clutter-free shape.

Do serious cleaning first. Clean up the kind of dirt that comes in from outside like mud on your shoes, germs that can grow if you leave food out overnight, and the like. Clean it up.

Quick pick me up

How do I achieve this marvel of home cleanliness? About 10 minutes before I head off to bed, I do a quick clean up: Load the dishwasher, put away that jacket that I tossed on a chair when I had to take a phone call, put my gym shoes in the closet, etc. I don’t go full force. I just do a few little things to keep the house in order.

The next morning, I find the house is in reasonably good shape. This nighttime trick prevents the clutter from getting out of hand. When you have a big mountain of cleaning to do, it can be overwhelming. Tidy up!

More at source: Naples News

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The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office today announced a settlement with a San Francisco-based janitorial company resulting in the payment of more than $1.3 million to employees who were denied health care benefits to which they were entitled under the Healthy San Francisco program.

In a ruling in San Francisco Superior Court on Monday, GMG Janitorial, Inc., was found to have failed to make the required payments on behalf of its workers between 2008 and 2010, and subsequently ordered to pay about $1.34 million to 275 of its current and former employees, the city attorney’s office said.

More at source: SF Appeal

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"The 'smart home' is getting smarter by the day, soon prophesying and providing our every want and need. Cleaning will be no exception. But before the robot revolution arrives, we are already eliminating cleaning dread. The kinds of small, highly efficient motors our engineers are developing give versatile cordless vacuums the power of their tethered counterparts, making a quick clean achievable, no matter the moment. And those robots? Eventually they'll take on all the household chores, predicting our undetected needs and adapting to the environment around them. They'll clean up autonomously, invisibly, completely hygienically and far more effectively than old-fashioned elbow grease."

More at source: Wall Street Journal 

James Dyson, inventor and founder of Dyson Ltd.

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Keywords: Cleaning Robots, Cleaning Robots Vs. Humans, Cleaning Forms

 Mr. Dajnowski could be found more than halfway up the Obelisk, cleaning a hieroglyph for the “s” sound in a cartouche reading: “User-Maat-Re, beloved of Amun.” A few levels down, Robert Zarycki was passing a laser beam over a bowl-shaped hieroglyph representing a basket and the sound “nb,” or Lord. Together with a cartouche below, it read: “Lord of the two lands, User-Maat-Re, chosen of Re.”

User-Maat-Re is known today as Ramses II. He followed Thutmose III by about 200 years and added his own inscriptions to each face of the Obelisk, flanking those of his predecessor. A later pharaoh, Osorkon I, squeezed in short tributes to himself. (“Cleopatra’s Needle” is a misnomer for the Obelisk. She had nothing to do with it.)

Though the conservators wore bulky respirators and greenish goggles, the scene around the Obelisk did not look like something out of science fiction. The laser did not produce a ruby-red beam, but a white pinpoint. It did not hum eerily. It crackled.

The cleaning is to be finished in a week or so. After that, loose surfaces will be stabilized with a consolidating agent that binds stone particles at a molecular level. All the work should be finished in the fall, when the scaffolding will come down.

The $500,000 project is paid for by the private, nonprofit Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park under contract with the City of New York.

More at source: NY TIMES

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On a steaming day in Hoboken, a blonde woman stands outside of her home washing baby strollers with a toothbrush. Cloudy water sits in a bowl besides her, and as she scrubs the upholstery, her head bobs to the beat.

Just a year earlier, Hoboken mom Anna Stanin was working at a high-profile job on Wall Street. She quit her job in October 2013, and shortly after, began a stroller-cleaning service from home.

"People thought I was absolutely insane," said the entrepreneur with a laugh.

Less than a year later, Sudsy Buggy has a large returning client list and is in the early stages of making it a franchise business.

Based out of her Park Avenue apartment, Stanin cleans strollers, car seats and other kid-friendly items with organic products and kitchen concoctions. 

"At first I was buying off-the-shelf stuff," Stanin said. "The store stuff is crap."

She said she found the best way to clean mold, sunscreen stains and baby fluids is with items she already had in her kitchen and bathroom.

"The parents feel good knowing it's all natural," Stanin added.

She also has some first-hand experience. Stanin, along with keeping up her business, 

More at source: NJ.com

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Humble, Texas (CBS HOUSTON) – A Whataburger employee says she was “humiliated” at work for her weight, and that her manager at the fast-food restaurant made her get on her hands and knees to clean the store floor with a “toothbrush.”

Whitney Clark says she has heard insults and fat jokes for years, but the way she has been treated as a cook at the Whataburger off the 1960 bypass road was completely humiliating, KHOU-TV reports. Clark says the insults from her managers at the fast-food restaurant finally culminated when she was “humiliated” and forced to clean the restaurant floor with a toothbrush.

More at source: CBS

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Published in the Journal of Consumer Research,Delphine Dion (Sorbonne Business School), Ouidade Sabri (Paris-Est University), and Valerie Guillard (University of Paris Dauphine) set out to understand why we’re so finicky about our personal space. 

IKEA (or The Container Store or Real Simple) may have elevated organization to an art form. But modern fantasies of tidiness reach back into the nineteenth century, and the idea that messiness presents some kind of danger. A neat home yielded social recognitionundefinedand a messy home, disapprobation. (Of course, mothers and wives stood at the center of this order, guardians of the domestic sanctuary.) Today, we have a dizzying array of brands, products, services, and ads that insist mess is dangerous 

More at source: New Republic

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“Something tragic has happened in these people’s lives,” says owner Matt Paxton. “So we go in very delicately and help them through the process of cleaning up.”

The company won't disclose specific revenue, but their extensive experience working on both small jobs, like cleaning out and organizing a garage, to larger-scale assignments, like those contracted by the county to completely gut and sanitize a home, can rake in $30,000 to $40,000 or more. Big projects like these typically involve someone who has a mental disorder that causes them to compulsively collect items -- particularly those that are worthless, hazardous or unsanitary. And after eight years of specializing in this type of work, 

More at source: Yahoo

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