Tidy Tuesday – Cleaning Blinds and Curtains

Shiny windows and freshly painted trim framed by dusty curtains? Just not quite the thing, you know? Now that I’ve been painting in the kitchen and working on cleaning windows, I am moving on to the curtains. (If I had blinds, I’d want to clean them now, too.)

Photo: SXC/Michal Zacharzewski

There are two levels of curtain cleaning – taking them to the dry cleaners for a thorough clean or taking them down, shaking them out to remove dust and then touching them up with an iron and spray starch to make them crisp again. When it is time to send them to the dry cleaners, I usually just hand wash them and hope for the best. (I make most of my own curtains from washable fabrics, though. Well, I buy the fabric and measure the window and then leave the fabric sitting around for six months until my mom asks what it is for and makes them for me…But I did make my own bedroom and art studio curtains.)

Whoa, am I having trouble with wandering off on tangents today or what? Anyway, I don’t currently have any mini blinds because I no longer live smack up against neighbors like I did in the city, but I used to have them in every window and spent a lot of time cleaning before I figured out how to do it.

Usually, you can just run a duster over the blind slats to keep dirt and dust from building up. However, once or twice a year, the blinds will start to look a little grimy, even with regular dusting. This is when you take them down and give them a thorough cleaning. Everyone seems to have a slightly different cleaning method, but here’s the one that worked for me:

Fill a tub with warm water, add a few squirts of dishwashing liquid and let the blinds sit in the tub for a bit. Usually, that will get them pretty clean, but I always wipe down each slat with a damp sponge to remove any streaks and smears that would show up after they dried. It is time consuming, but they do get nice and fresh looking again.