Many people seek refuge indoors around this time of year, when outdoor air is full of pollen and other allergens. For allergy sufferers, however, the air indoors can prove to be just as problematic.

Dust that collects in a home contains common household allergens such as dust mite particles and animal dander. If dust is disturbed from furniture, hard surfaces and carpet, those allergens can become airborne and reduce indoor air quality. 

May is designated National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, and it is an excellent time to make your home cleaner and healthier by removing common household allergens and improving your indoor air. Even if you don’t have asthma or allergies, everyone can benefit from better indoor air quality.

“The way you clean your home is important. Most household cleaning routines only re-circulate allergens throughout your home rather than removing them,” says Justin Bates, president of Stanley Steemer, International, Inc. “If your cleaning routine doesn't specifically focus on dust and allergen removal, you may be only moving them around, sending allergens back into the air.”

To maximize your cleaning efforts while reducing allergens, consider these simple tips:

• Dust hard surfaces regularly with moist cloths or special dry dusters designated to trap and lock dust.
• Wash your bedding and linens often. Doing so can help you control dust mites in your home.
• Vacuum often. Although cleaning can sometimes trigger allergic reactions by releasing dust into the air, vacuuming floors once or twice a week will reduce surface dust and allergens. Make sure your vacuum has a high efficiency air filter to capture dust.
• Use a certified professional carpet cleaning service to deep clean your carpets to remove the stains, spills and dust that regular vacuuming leaves behind. Be sure to use a service that’s qualified to reduce allergens in the home. Stanley Steemer’s Professional Carpet Cleaning service is the first to be certified asthma and allergy friendly by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA).

Independent testing proved Stanley Steemer’s proprietary cleaning process removed 94 percent of common household allergens, including 92.8 percent of cat dander, 97.8 percent of dog dander and 91.4 percent of dust mite allergens. The process also reduces exposure to bacteria and mold by 90 percent within 24 hours of cleaning. AAFA recommends a certified professional carpet cleaning every three to four months.

• Protect yourself when doing housework by wearing a mask. After cleaning, consider leaving for a few hours to avoid allergens in the air.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) undefined After a tip to ReportIt, Target 8 went undercover to discover a man with a wild name, a shady past and a nude house cleaning business that local police are also checking out.

The questionable business being run out of an office at Brookfield Office Plaza on 28th Street is owned by a man named Sexual Sin Blue.

That wasn’t always his name undefined he grew up in Lansing as Reginald Jones. Target 8 never learned precisely why he changed his name.

It could have something to do with his business, which is, “as he explained it, naked house cleaning,” Grand Rapids Police Department Lt. Pat Merrill said.

Blue has been running Craigslist employment ads for Grand Rapids, Muskegon and the Detroit area for his Exotic Five Star Professional Maid Service, a business he started in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The ad says “Exotic means ‘NUDE’ house cleaning for high-profile clients.”

Grand Rapids police detectives show up at Sexual Sin Blue’s office Friday to find out what he was doing and offer some advice: namely, that he should have talked to city licensing and zoning officials first.

“The type of business we’re talking about got our attention. We said, ‘Wait a minute: Has this gentleman talked to anybody? Because this is probably not going to fly.’ He’s going to want to run it through first. Don’t want to waste a bunch of money try to start a business here that’s going to be shut down,” Merrill said.

Target 8 went undercover to fill out an application. Blue said the job was just house cleaning. He did not mention anything about it being nude.

He told another Target 8 investigator he was running a regular cleaning service for rich clients as well as the nude cleaning gig.

And he asked the undercover applicant for $25 to run a criminal background check on her.

That, the Better Business Bureau says, should be a red flag.

“If someone asked me to pay them $25 to do a background check on me and I was applying for a job with them, I would turn around and walk out the door,” West Michigan BBB President Phil Catlett said.

Catlett said people looking for a job should be wary of online employment ads that want money upfront, a practice he says is becoming more common.

“But,” he qualified, “From a credible employer, highly unusual.”

And Blue does have some credibility problems. He has a long history of passing bad checks in Michigan along with fraud, larceny, trespassing, property destruction and prostitution charges. When he was in California, police got him for auto theft, grand theft, larceny and soliciting for prostitution.

When Target 8 went to talk to him with cameras rolling, he declined to comment and shut his office door.

Police say he hasn’t paid his rent on his office space and the landlord is trying to get him out. They say Blue told them he’s thinking about his next move.

Video and more at source: NBC

Find a cleaning services that cares about... cleaning. 

The entire eastern half of the country will see wet weather Tuesday, with more severe storms expected in the South and the Great Lakes.

Southeast: Severe thunderstorms will again lash the southeastern U.S. on Tuesday, with the worst weather likely in Mississippi and Alabama. Tornadoes and hail will pelt the region, and drenching rain will also lead to flooding.

Upper Midwest, northern Plains: Winter will again rear its ugly head from the Dakotas to Michigan, where a few inches of wet snow will whiten the region. Temperatures will remain in the 30s and 40s.

West: Although some light snow and showers are forecast in the Rockies, the rest of the West will be clear and dry. Temperatures will soar into the 80s and 90s in California.

More at source: USA Today

Find a flood and damage cleaning service here. 

 Members of Tufts Labor Coalition (TLC) last Wednesday held a rally and march in support of the school's janitors, presenting demands to the administration after discovering that custodial service provider DTZ/Unicco appeared to be in breach of its contract.

    Rae Axner, TLC vice president and one of the event's organizers, explained that the janitors' employer has been manipulating the workforce and its schedule.

    "The janitors are clearly in a precarious situation because they are not employed by Tufts University; they are employed by their contractor DTZ/Unicco," Axner, a senior, said. "There [have] been a lot of problems with the contractor in the past couple of years. There are three major issues that are going on right now, two of which are contractual violations, one of which isn't specifically a violation of the contract undefined it's just mistreatment."

    Axner said that DTZ/Unicco's main issues are having too few full-time employees at Tufts, the janitors not receiving weekly paychecks during time off and having increasingly large workloads.

    "The janitors are not being employed full-time at the rate that their contract states that they should be," she explained. "The contract says that 75 percent of the janitorial staff should be full-time employees and that DTZ should be aspiring to employ 90 percent of the janitorial staff full-time. Currently, about 58 percent are full-time and that number is corroborated between the janitors, the union, DTZ and Linda Snyder, the vice president of operations at Tufts."

    Snyder explained that the contract DTZ negotiated with the union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was agreed upon last year.

    "With respect to the obligation to reach a goal of 75 / 25 in full-time / part-time employees, DTZ has told us that it believes it is not in violation of the contract," she told the Daily in an email. "The SEIU contract requires that the goal be reached through attrition, which is a provision that the SEIU negotiated to avoid layoffs. DTZ says that attrition, in which an employee voluntarily leaves employment, in the university custodial workforce is very low and therefore has not been sufficient to reach the goal."

    Axner, however, suggested that the issue is complex and expanded upon the hiring practices of DTZ.

    "When janitors leave full-time positions, they are not replacing those full-time positions, but rather letting people continue to work part-time and really just dividing that workload among part-time employees, reducing the staff, not actually hiring to replace full-time employees and not promoting within the staff from part-time to full-time," she said.

    She suggested that DTZ has engaged in schedule manipulation in order to avoid paying for the benefits that come with being a full-time employee, including healthcare and paid time off.

    "It is our understanding that DTZ has actually been manipulating the schedules of the janitors specifically so they don't have to grant full-time status to employees that are essentially working full-time," Axner said. "For example, they will have full-time hours for two weeks, and then their hours will be reduced for one week so that they aren't working full-time for the amount of time that they would legally have to be [in order to be] considered full-time employees."

    Giovanna Castro, the incoming TLC vice president and current chair of the group's janitors and dining hall workers committee, led the rally, which consisted of students, professors and janitors. She said the rally was purposely planned during the lunch breaks of many custodial workers.

    "We had a bunch of posters and ... a fair amount of janitors came and they also had their posters," Castro, a junior, said. "Three of the janitors came up and spoke, and I translated for some of them. One of the things that just really touched me was that one of them said, 'Remember, kids, you are the engine of this university.'"

    Rally participants marched down Professors Row, up Packard Avenue and over to Ballou Hall where they presented a list of demands to Snyder and other administration officials. One of the other demands included fixing the pay schedules for workers on vacations, who, according to Castro, are supposed to receive checks every week.

    "That's something they want and that DTZ isn't doing," she said. "That's an issue that DTZ has been [confronting] nationwide, so if we win at Tufts, it could be a huge win for DTZ employees nationwide."

    While not an actual violation of the contract, the increasing workloads of DTZ employees are unjust, according to Axner.

    "Their work strain has gone way up, and the quality of their work has gone way down," Axner said. "They take great pride in the quality of the work they do. ... We have janitors who are assigned to three, four, five buildings every day and DTZ also does not keep staff on retainer to cover when other janitors are sick."

    Axner said that this means DTZ is likely cutting corners and providing less to Tufts than it is contractually obligated to do.

    Snyder explained that the contract cost to the university was agreed upon in last year's negotiations, and she could not speculate on how costs could potentially change in a new contract. The agreement runs through July 31, 2016, according to a copy of the contract Axner provided to the Daily.

    "[The contract] is signed and final," she said. "We are very conscious of the fact that the costs of operating the university, including the costs of custodial services, contribute to the cost of higher education and therefore tuition."

More at source: Tufts Daily

Find a janitorial service here. 

StatePoint - Many people seek refuge indoors around this time of year, when outdoor air is full of pollen and other allergens. For allergy sufferers, however, the air indoors can prove to be just as problematic.

Dust that collects in a home contains common household allergens such as dust mite particles and animal dander. If dust is disturbed from furniture, hard surfaces and carpet, those allergens can become airborne and reduce indoor air quality. 

May is designated National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, and it is an excellent time to make your home cleaner and healthier by removing common household allergens and improving your indoor air. Even if you don’t have asthma or allergies, everyone can benefit from better indoor air quality.

“The way you clean your home is important. Most household cleaning routines only re-circulate allergens throughout your home rather than removing them,” says Justin Bates, president of Stanley Steemer, International, Inc. “If your cleaning routine doesn't specifically focus on dust and allergen removal, you may be only moving them around, sending allergens back into the air.”

More at source: Grand Lake News

Find a cleaning service for your home here. 

How could the versatile lemon be associated with things that don’t work well? High in citric acid, lemon juice one of the best natural cleaners due to its low pH and antibacterial properties. Lemons also smell great and aren’t likely to cause damage to materials around what you are cleaning such as fabric or wood.

When cleaning with lemons always rinse with warm soapy water and dry with a clean cloth afterward. One of the very few things you can’t clean with lemon juice is anything that is brass plated as the juice will damage the item. Aside from that, here is a list of items that can be cleaned with lemons.

1. Use a half lemon and salt to clean even the most heavily discolored brass (real brass, not brass plated). Be careful with antiques. Always test a small spot before scrubbing away.

2. The same method can be used for copper items such has copper bottoms of pots.

3. You can also shine up your chrome faucets or the chrome on older model cars with lemon and salt.

4. Diluted lemon juice not only cleans stains from cutting boards, but helps kill germs as well. Rub the juice full strength onto the stain and let sit until the stain fades. Can be left overnight, then rinsed well and dried.

5. Use lemon juice and an old toothbrush to scrub grout.

6. Clean your microwave and remove odors. Place a cup 3/4 full of water with a couple tablespoons of lemon juice in the microwave. Heat to boiling. Don’t open the door for another 10 minutes. Then just wipe away food particles with a clean cloth and dry.

7. Put a dilute solution of lemon juice in a spray bottle to clean laminate counter tops. Rinse with water and dry afterward.

8. Scrub grills and grates with lemon juice and salt.

9. Soak plastic food storage containers in dilute lemon juice to remove stains and odors. Add baking soda and scrub, rinse and dry.

10. Remove rust stains from cotton and polyesters. Make a paste with lemon juice and cream of tarter and rub the mixture into the stain. Let the item sit for about a half hour, and then wash as normal (test before use).

11. Sanitize your garbage disposal. Pour a gallon of hot water mixed with a half cup of lemon juice down the drain. This tip is from Hometalk.com member Ann from Conyers, Ga. (Hometalk.com is a social network dedicated to home improvement.)

12. Brighten your clothing by soaking clothes in a hot water and lemon juice mix (about a half cup per gallon of water) and then wash as normal. Works best if laundry is then dried in the sun. Lemon juice should not be used on silks or other delicate fabrics. If you are uncertain, test a tiny area first.

13. Add a few drops of lemon juice to your dish soap to boost degreasing ability.

14. Remove odors from your refrigerator with a half lemon on a saucer. Change once a week.

15. Clean food preparation smells from your hands with a dilute solution of water and lemon juice.

16. Remove grease stains from clothing. Rub lemon juice into the spot and let sit overnight and then wash as normal.

17. Clean windows and mirrors. Put a few tablespoons of lemon juice and water into a spray bottle. Works as well as a vinegar solution and smells better.

18. Keep your toilet bowl fresh. Place a half cup of lemon juice in the bowl and swish with a toilet bowl brush.

19. Sanitize earrings by placing them in a saucer of lemon juice.

20. Unclog your drain with a mixture of baking soda followed by lemon juice. The foaming action will clear minor clogs.

21. Clean hard water stains on glass shower doors with half a lemon.

22. Clean mineral buildup on tea kettle and coffee pots by boiling lemon slices in the pots. Allow the mixture to sit for an hour or two, and then rinse and dry.

23. A dilute lemon juice rinse for your hair cuts soap residue and leaves hair softer and shinier.

24. Lastly, you can make a facial scrub of sugar and lemon juice for cleaner, softer skin.