Keep Your Kitchen Clean! Top Food Prep Surfaces Every Mom Needs

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Keeping your kitchen clean isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about creating a safe, efficient space for your family. From messy meal prep to accidental spills, your kitchen surfaces bear the brunt of daily use.

Choosing the right materials can make all the difference in managing cleanliness and food safety. Let’s dive into the top food prep surfaces every mum needs to keep the heart of her home spotless and practical.

Acrylic Sheets: A Modern Must-Have

Acrylic sheets are a game-changer for mums looking to balance style and functionality. They’re lightweight, durable, and incredibly easy to clean, making them ideal for kitchen backsplashes and countertops.

Their non-porous surface ensures they don’t harbour bacteria or stains, unlike some traditional materials. Whether it’s wiping up spills or disinfecting after food prep, acrylic sheets simplify your cleaning routine.

Available in various colours and finishes, they allow you to customise your kitchen’s look without sacrificing practicality. If you’re considering a high-quality option, Simply Plastics is known for offering durable acrylic sheets that blend form and function perfectly.

Incorporating them into your kitchen can significantly elevate your space while keeping it easy to maintain.

Granite: Timeless Durability

Granite has long been a favourite for its natural beauty and resilience. This robust material stands up well to heat and heavy use, making it ideal for busy family kitchens. While it’s durable, regular sealing is necessary to keep its surface hygienic and resistant to stains. With proper care, granite can last a lifetime, maintaining its charm and functionality.

How to Keep Your Home Clean During School Holidays: Survival Tips for Parents

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{This is a collaborative post}

Having kids at home during the school holidays is great, but it often means any household mess multiplies exponentially. This is just a fact of life, although for those of us who like tidy homes, it can mean more unnecessary stress.

So, how do you keep your home clean during the school holidays? Below are some tips that should help make things a bit more manageable.

 

How to Keep Your Home Clean During School Holidays

 

1. Designate Play and Activity Areas

If you have young children who like making messes, set up designated areas in which it’s safe for them to do so. This could be the dining room table, the living room, or somewhere else.

The key here is to contain mess so it’s easier to clean up. Don’t be afraid to let your kids have a good time, but just aim to keep everything in its designated place. Then when you need to tidy up, it should be a bit easier.

 

2. Assign Cleaning Jobs

Get kids involved in the cleaning process as much as possible. Younger kids can put away their toys, while older children can help with sorting out bins, the dishwasher, and so on. If they receive pocket money, include cleaning in their list of jobs over the holidays.

If you struggle with motivating them, have a designated cleaning hour. Put on some music and make it an enjoyable activity that you can do together. You could even turn it into a race to see who gets done the fastest.

 

3. Tidy as You Go

Make sure everyone tidies as they go to cut down on larger cleaning jobs. For example, get kids to bring washing up down with them, or make sure they bring their rubbish to the bin if they’re passing it.

Similarly, implement a “touch once” rule. This is pretty self-explanatory: if you start a job, finish it so it doesn’t need to be touched again. If you’ve folded some clean washing, organise it into piles and take them to their respective rooms.

 

COVID Cleaning Tips for a Stress-free Home

 

{This is a collaborative post}

As COVID-19 surges in the UK again, families are scrambling to keep their homes clean. But it’s important to remember that we don’t just clean our homes for our own sakes or for fear of infection. We also clean our homes to create a safe haven for the ones we love.

Home should be a place where we can feel comfortable and relax. It should be a place where we can leave our stresses at the door and enjoy peace, love, and togetherness. Nothing’s worse than coming home to stress and anxiety and that’s why it’s so important to make sure we disinfect and clean properly during the pandemic. Not just for our physical health, but for our mental health too.

We’ve rounded up some fantastic cleaning tips to make your home feel cleaner and your mood lighter.

Disinfect with UV Light

Walking into a home that smells like a hospital isn’t very reassuring or relaxing. But that’s some homes smell like due to the constant chemical spraying and bleaching. To ditch the fumes and odours (and the scrubbing too!), you can disinfect just as effectively with a UV light wand.

UV light is proven to kill coronaviruses like COVID-19, and it’s so effective that it’s been used by the NHS in hospitals for years. However, it’s never been practical or affordable to use in the home until now.

Now, you can get a handheld UV light wand that kills 99.99% of bacteria, viruses, mould, fungus, and more in seconds. It’s 100% natural, so it leaves no stinky odours or toxic residues behind and, for parents, it requires no scrubbing at all! Just pass the UV-C light wand over objects in your home as if you were shining a torch on them. That’s all it takes!

Our favourite UV-C wand is called Allume, and it’s made by Violet Healthcare. This wand is powerful and effective, but it also has the necessary safety features to prevent UV light from shining on your skin or eyes.

Spring Cleaning Doesn't need to be Overwhelming

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{This is a collaborative post}

The stormy weather may be denying that Spring is here but the clocks going forward in a couple of weeks confirm it. The blossom is starting to bloom and I'm not needing to defrost my car in the mornings, so those are both serious reasons to be thankful for Spring. Luckily I'm one of those people who enjoy a good cleaning session, but I know I am in the minority so I thought I'd share with you my tips for spring cleaning, without the overwhelm.

1.  Make a Plan

How deep do you want to clean? It is totally up to you, it's your home after all. Of course, if you want to wash every wall, and clean all the curtains, it is going to take you longer, but that's OK just plan for it. Try to be realistic and depending how much cleaning you want to do and what time you have, make a list of all the tasks that need doing and plan what you will be able to do in a week. My Spring cleaning takes about 4 weeks, as I do like to do the whole house and really give it a good going over.

2.  Tackle the clutter

Before you even get on with the cleaning, it is important to de-clutter and tidy up. Just imagine how much longer it will take you to clean if you are working around the mess. A few years ago I employed the Mari Kondo method for clearing out and I found it worked a treat. I'm probably at the point of needing to clear out again, but being very strict and assessing if items bought me joy was a great way of clearing out and being ruthless.

Review: Karcher FC5 Hard Floor Cleaner - Is It Any Good?

Earlier this month I was sent the Karcher FC5 Hard Floor cleaner to review.  I've used it for a couple of weeks to give it a good try out and now want to share with you my thoughts.



Most of them I've put into my video review, which you can see above but for those of you who don't like videos then here is the low-down.

What is the Karcher FC5?
The Karcher FC5 Hard Floor cleaner vacuums and mops all in one action, so you can save time by only having to go over your floor area once. It is suitable for all sorts of hard floors such as laminate, lino, marble, tile, stone and sealed wood and it picks up light debris, pet hairs and controls the water to mop the floor without it becoming too wet. I was very impressed that after cleaning the floor with the FC5 the floor was dry within a couple of minutes, even in cooler weather. This is a big plus point.

The RRP of the FC5 is £249.99 with a two year guarantee, but when shopping around I found it quite a bit cheaper and with some good deals out there, so make sure you have a web search. The weight of the FC5 is 4.6kg and personally I found it fairly heavy to use after a while but I do have early-onset arthritis in my elbows so this could be why. It isn't free standing and you get a 'cleaning and storage station' with it. I tend to call it a docking station or mounting station as basically, it is where you place the FC5 when you are not using it to clean. It's just a sturdy black plastic tray, but it does the job well and holds the FC5 secure and upright.

Video Review: Samsung AddWash WW8500 12kg Washing Machine

You know the M&S adverts, "this is no ordinary sausage roll this is an M&S sausage roll" and all those kind of things? Well this washing machine that I have been trying out is no ordinary washing machine, it is a Samsung AddWash machine with ecobubble technology and digital inverter motor, it is the pinnacle of washing machines and for me becomes my number one brand for laundry appliances.

I've had a few Samsung products over the years and I have to say they have lasted well, we have a small TV upstairs that we have had for almost two decades and the girls have Tab2 tablets that have taken such a battering and they are still going strong. Samsung is a name I trust and will happily buy but I admit I had no idea they did large kitchen appliances and now I am keen to let the world know how good they are. I said this to my Korean friend Eun Keoung when she came for dinner the other night and she laughed and said 'of course, they are Korean'.

Reviewing the Vileda Easy Wring and Clean Turbo Mop

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying out the new Vileda Easy Wring and Clean Turbo Mop and it is fab. What has really surprised me is that the kids love it too and are eager to mop the floor. Let me tell you, this has never happened before! I don't know if it is because the new easy wring bucket makes it so simple to get a near-day mop to be able to clean the floor without too much fuss or because they are currently earning points for one-on-one time with either me or my husband but it is a big hit. The floor has never been so clean.

The easy wring and clean turbo mop has an RRP of £34.99 but I have seen it for £29.99 at Argos and you get everything you need in that price. My personal recommendation would be to buy direct from Vileda at the moment though as they are chucking in a free replacement head (worth £5.99) with the set for the RRP.  The mop and bucket arrive neatly packaged in a box and are super quick to put together. I'm impressed that it is a sturdy product built to last and that you can buy replacement heads.

Trying out my Karcher MV3P Vac

This week as part of my position as a Karcher Clean Ambassador I had a new MV3P vac delivered to me and I've been putting it through it paces to see how it performs.

The MV3P is a dry and wet vacuum cleaner that can also be used as a blower and will attach to hand tools as well to automatically collect the dust and debris as you work. This makes the MV3P perfect for DIY users as well as being a generally good vac for around the home. The cheapest I found this model from reputable sellers was £119 from Tesco Direct and I think this is a good price.

The vac comes with a 4 metre cable and 17 litre capacity. It has the power of 1400 watts but is only actually 1000 watts. You need to use a bag inside when dry vacuuming but nothing is needed for wet vacuuming and thankfully the filter is multi-function and can be used for both and then just taken out and washed though when need be. The vacuum head comes with a brush and squidgy blade end for use in both circumstances and it is really easy to switch them over. There is also a crevice attachment that can go on the end for use in tight spaces and when you really can't get into a space (like behind a radiator) you can change the hose to the back hole and use the blow function and get the dust out that way and then vacuum it up.

I found the vac very easy to put together, first you need to push the four wheels in the bottom and this was super easy and then you plug in the hose and build the vacuum handle, which is just a case of pushing them together. The bag inside just clipped on and was completely intuitive which is very good as I never find Karcher instructions that easy to follow if I'm honest. Thankfully their website is good and normally has instructional videos. I also found this great review video from DIY Doctor and whilst it says it is reviewing a different model, having watched it I can see it is the same machine with the same capabilities.

I've only tried out dry vacuuming so far as that is basically what I will use it for. We do not have any hand tools and thankfully there have not been any water leaks but I fully expect the water vacuum function to be very good as even my handy Karcher window cleaner is great at sucking up water spills.

I first vacuumed the girls little playroom/ spare room and it is only small as you can see in the picture. It gets vacuumed fairly regularly but with kids of course it gets messy too but I was astounded to see the amount of hair and fluff that came off that small carpet and was caught in the brush end as well as what went into the bag - just look -

I was super impressed with its cleaning power on hard wood floors particularly, it is an easy and efficient vac to use. On carpets it has excellent suction but is harder work as it feels as if it sticks to the carpet a bit (because of the good suction I assume) and this means you have to work harder and I did not feel as if the plastic long arm would stand up to years of me pushing too hard.

What I love -

• Multi function, wet and dry vacuuming as well as blower function
• Easy to set up
• Light weight for carrying around
• Nice long cable
• Excellent suction power, especially for hairs
• Good value price
• Excellent storage for all pipes and accessories/ lead

What I didn't find so great -

• A fair amount of effort needed on carpeted floors
• The look of it, who wants a bright yellow plastic vacuum?

In all I think it is a great vacuum cleaner, probably better than my Sebo which cost far more. I would happily recommend it, especially if you have hardwood, laminate or lino floors.

Disclosure: As part of the Karcher Clean Ambassador program I have given products to trial and review. I'm not instructed what to write and I remain honest.

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Genuinely I love my Karcher Electric Broom (Review)

I've had a few Karcher toys to play with and test out so far in my role as a Karcher Clean Ambassador. First there was the Steam Cleaner which I really love and use every week, then I had the K4 compact pressure washer which worked a treat and my Mum & Dad currently have this to give their patio a good blast. My last item to try out was the WV60 Window Vac which I have to be honest and say has not been the most used of my toys, it comes out mostly to suck up spills, it is super good at that!

I was given a choice of what to review this last month and none of them excited me, a hose for a garden I do not own, a hard floor cleaner which I don't need or an electric broom. I opted for the broom and hoped for the best and boy did I come up trumps.  This has to be my favourite Karcher Product yet, even better than the steam cleaner.

The boom arrived in pieces and was really intuitive to put together, I didn't even look at the instructions and got it right first time!

Take a look at my short video and I'll show you the broom and how it works and wait for the end, I'm sure you'll be amazed to see how well it picks up.



The Karcher K65 electric broom retails for £75.00 and is available on Amazon. It comes with the charger for the removable battery and 2 separate brush heads, as well as a wall mounting kit.

I have found it to be excellent and am super pleased to have it as part of my regular cleaning kit. It is more efficient than my vacuum cleaner (I kid you not) and it means no more carrying a heavy appliance up the stairs to the bedrooms.

Disclosure: As part of the Karcher Clean Ambassador program I have given products to trial and review. I'm not instructed what to write and I remain honest.

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If you like what you have read and want to stay up-to-date then subscribe by email for free and receive blog posts directly to your in-box - just click the link Subscribe to Mummy From The Heart... by Email or perhaps you like to keep all your blog reading in one place, if that is the case you can follow me on BlogLovin too!

Reviewing the Vileda 1 2 Spray Mop

Cleaning, I know it is some people's idea of hell but I do not mind a good cleaning session.  Clear the kids out the house and give me some time and I am quite happy to get down to a bit of sorting and scrubbing.  The sense of satisfaction when it is all done is amazing.  Of course now I have kids my blissfully clean home is shattered within minutes of them returning but that is the small price I pay for having a fun and lively family life.

Vileda obviously heard about my love of cleaning as they asked me to review their new mop for them, the 1 2 Spray. Take a look at my vlog and watch the mop in action and learn a bit more about it.



After making the vlog I did use the mop with water and bucket and I think the words I used to describe the cleaning action with the 1 2 spray mop to my Mum were 'it glides like a dream'. As I did not have the special bucket with the wringer, I used my own method which did work well but having tried out this mop with water I will be investing in the proper bucket as I know I will want to use this regularly.

I also removed the cleaning pad and washed it at 60 degrees, it came up perfectly and dried nice and soft on the line, ready for use again.  Much more hygienic than my regular mop head which just gets rinsed with water.

The 1 2 Spray mop gets a 4.5 out of 5 overall, I love the mop and it performs fantastically but at £24.99 for the mop, £7.49 for the bucket and wringer and £5.99 for a refill pad it is not the cheapest option available.

If you would like to find out more about this or any other Vileda product, then take a look at their website HERE.

Disclosure: This is a sposnored post, I was paid to review this mop and I received the mop free of charge. I have not been instructed what to write and I remain honest.