Your house might look clean, but Clutterbug says there is dirt, debris and plenty of things hiding in it that you have never noticed. To prove it, she set out to make her own home as disgusting as possible with something she calls the dirty rag challenge.
The rules are simple. Grab white cloths, old towels or a ripped-up T-shirt, and the rags must be white. You get one rag per room and 10 minutes per room to make it as dirty as you can.
At the end, you line the rags up and see which room wins the prize for the grossest space in your home. She asked viewers to guess the winner in the comments before the big reveal.
Her video on the Clutterbug channel walks through four rounds, starting with the kitchen. She dampened the rag with multipurpose cleaner, not soaking wet, just damp, and began with the stuff you touch daily.
Start With The Handles, Then Climb To The Dusty Spots You Never See
In the kitchen she wiped fridge, oven and dishwasher handles, light switches and cabinet knobs. Then she went higher, to the places she says we skip because we are short and out of sight means out of mind, like the top of the fridge, the edge of the cabinets and the range hood.
Up there she found dust balls, a gooey mess, and a spider that was still alive. She squished it and moved on.
Next came the low spots. She moved the toaster and the crock and wiped under a pumpkin, because she says there are probably dead bugs and grime behind anything on your counter. The final boss was the kick plate under the cabinets, which she says is always full of things.
The Living Room Rag Was A Letdown, So She Turned It Into A Contest With Herself
In the living room she started with remote controls, lamps and light fixtures, then coffee table and TV stand surfaces. She even warned that a very wet rag can make a light bulb explode, and added, “Ask me how I know.”
High shelves, picture frames and the tops of door frames came next. Then she went behind furniture and found a jelly bean, then another, plus cat hair. She admitted she was surprisingly sad that the room was not dirtier, so her goal became to dig out more dirt than she otherwise would have bothered to look for.
Bedroom And Bathroom Rounds Turned Up Cobwebs, Sticky Blinds And A Tub Nobody Moved In 3 Years
In the bedroom she wiped door handles, bedside tables, lamps, the charging station, the headboard top, curtain rods and blinds. The blinds were sticky. She said her weekly cleaning routine meant there was not much dirt, so she dug deeper behind and under furniture, found spider webs, and joked it was like going into Narnia if Narnia were cat hair and dust.
The bathroom was the room she expected to win. She wiped switches, vanity pulls, doorknobs, the top of the mirror, the shower frame and the vent, then went low behind the vanity and garbage can.
She has a free-standing tub and says she had never wiped behind it in the 3 years she has lived there. Her words were that there were definitely bugs. Then she tackled the area around the toilet, joking that if you live with a man you should buckle up.
The Winner Was The Bedroom, And Robot Vacuums May Be Why The Others Lost
When she laid out all four rags, the filthiest one belonged to the bedroom. She said it shocked her, because she would have bet on the bathroom or the kitchen.
Her theory is the robot vacuums. She says they keep surfaces cleaner, and she felt like turning them off for a week so she could play the game for real.
She Started This Trick When Her Kids Were Little, And Everybody Got A Prize
Clutterbug says she began the game when her kids were very small because there was so much to clean. She would dampen a rag for each child and promise a prize to whoever got theirs dirtiest in 15 minutes, and they would run off like little minions and wipe everything. Everyone got a prize, but the point was that they thought it was a game while they were actually cleaning her house.
She says she even played it with kids when she ran a daycare, and they loved it. Her pitch is that kids, teens and maybe even your spouse will play, and that grown-ups will want to as well.
She says fall cleaning usually feels like a chore, with checklists and questions about washing the walls and moving all the furniture. With the white rag, there is no list. You are just hunting for the dirtiest spots, and when the timer goes off you are done.
How To Run Your Own White Rag Challenge This Week
The setup costs almost nothing. Cut or gather one white rag for each room you want to test, damp but not soaking for the kitchen and bathroom, and set a timer for 10 minutes.
Work in three passes the way she did. Wipe the things you touch every day first, then go high to door frames, shelves, frame tops and curtain rods, then go low behind and under furniture and along baseboards. Hold off on moving big furniture, since the point is the spots you can reach.
When time is up, line up the rags and let everyone guess before the reveal. Clutterbug says she ended up doing more rooms than the four she planned because she wanted to see how much dirt she could collect.
She also used the end of her video to mark fire prevention week. She suggested that every family pick a meeting spot, such as the tree in the front yard or a neighbor’s house across the street, far enough from the home to be safe but close enough that everyone can reach it and be counted. She also reminded people to test fire alarms, change the batteries and vacuum the dust out of them, since dusty alarms cause plenty of false calls.
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