So, you’ve just finished your construction job, but the job isn’t quite over yet. Guess what? There’s a huge mess left behind that must be cleaned up before you can say the job is done. Even working with the best general contractor crew, there is bound to be some leftover mess. This mess is inevitable with all the foot traffic coming in and out bringing in mud and all kinds of dirt, dust from all the tools you were using, plastic that needs to be removed, the list goes on.
If you plan to take on the cleaning job yourself, it could feel a little daunting and overwhelming at first. We’ve prepared a post-construction cleaning checklist made up of seven groups as a reminder of all the areas that need to be cleaned and what exactly needs to be done in those areas. If you were hired to just renovate the bathroom, for example, then you don’t need to worry about cleaning the garage. Use your judgement based on the job that was performed.
1. General Cleanup
The first area you need to focus on is the general cleanup. This could include hallways, offices, and spare rooms. The best way to get started is to bring in all of the cleaning supplies that you’ll be using and lay them out. If you have a crew, you’ll want to make sure you have enough for everyone. Next, divide the supplies up, decide who is going to take which room, and get to work.
Here is the checklist you’ll need for general cleanup:
Remove all of your tools and other renovation materials
Pick up all garbage and throw it away
Dust ceilings
Dust ceiling fans
Clean the walls with soap and warm water
Dust and clean the baseboards
Sweep and vacuum the floors
Wash the floors
Vacuum the carpeting (if there is any)
The above post-construction cleaning checklist contains the common areas that people clean. However, there are also other parts of the construction site that require cleaning:
Dust and clean windows and doors
Clean light fixtures and lightbulbs
Clean inside cabinets and closets
Dust woodwork
Clean inside drawers (dust travels everywhere!)
Wipe down blinds
2. Porch/Driveway
Now that the general areas have been taken care of, it’s time to move onto the porch and driveway. Since the driveway and porch are the first things the homeowners will see when you unveil their renovations, it’s extra important to clean these areas well. It will also serve to set a good first impression and be indicative of what’s inside.
Here’s what you’ll need to do:
Vacuum and dust entryway
Clean doors
Clean windows
Sweep and wash porches
Clean exterior lights
Clean threshold
Pressure wash driveway
3. Bedrooms
If you renovated the bedrooms, you’ll have some cleaning work to do in there as well. This checklist is dependent on whether or not you’ll be moving the furniture back into place, so let’s say for the sake of this checklist that you’re also in charge of putting the furniture back in place. Here’s what you’ll need to do to clean the bedrooms:
Clean the walls with soap and warm water
Dust and clean the baseboards
Sweep and vacuum the floors
Wash the floors
Wipe down the tops of dressers
Wipe down the tops of bookshelves, as well as the shelves
Clean mirrors
Clean inside closets
Wipe down blinds
4. Kitchen
Kitchens have lots of surfaces so you can imagine it will be a big job cleaning the kitchen after a renovation. It might be a good idea to get a couple of crew members in there to tackle this one together. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
Clean the walls with soap and warm water
Dust and clean the baseboards
Sweep and vacuum the floors
Wash the floors
Vacuum, dust, and clean shelving and drawers (inside and out)
Clean cabinet doors, tops of cabinets and glass
Clean countertops, sinks and backsplashes with soap and warm water
Vacuum, dust, and clean shelving, drawers, and cabinets (inside and out)
Sweep and vacuum the floors
Wash the floors
6. Garage
The garage will be a big cleanup, so it’s recommended to get a few crew members working on it at the same time. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
Vacuum, dust, and clean shelving, drawers, and cabinets (inside and out)
Sweep and vacuum the floors
Wash the floors
Wipe down the utilities (furnace, water heater, and other utilities)
7. Laundry Room
Finally, we have the laundry room. This room shouldn’t take up too much time, but it’s still important to give it a good clean. Here’s what you’ll need to do for the laundry room:
Vacuum, dust, and clean shelving, drawers, and cabinets (inside and out)
Wipe down appliances
Sweep and vacuum the floors
Wash the floors
Seems like a lot doesn’t it? Just as renovating a house is a huge job, the cleanup afterward is intense too. If you find this is too much for you and your crew, consider calling in the professionals.
Original Article Source Credits: How Stuff Works , https://home.howstuffworks.com/
You spend 40-plus hours a week in your office, and you’re doing the jobs of two people. It’s no wonder that at the end of the week, you’re searching under piles of paper for your car keys and cell phone when it’s time to go home.
A clean office makes for a clear head, but who has time to organize with your workload? Setting up systems and sticking to them allows you to work smarter while you work harder. It also gives the impression that you’re on top of things when your boss makes an impromptu visit to your office. Who wants to leave her standing there while you shuffle through mounds of paperwork to find the one file folder she needs? Here are five tips to get you started.
5: File As You Go
One of the biggest office offenders is piles of paper — on your desk, on your shelves, and eventually on your floor. It’s easy to get busy and start stacking papers to file for later, but before you know it, you have a task that’s too big to tackle. The key is to process papers as you go. Set up a system of trays or file folders that are clearly labeled and make it a habit to use them. The same goes for your computer desktop.
4: Clean Your Electronics
Hey you, with the food spattered monitor and keyboard full of crumbs. We know that you eat at your desk so you can work through lunch. And it certainly impresses your boss, but your co-workers are probably snickering about the week-old stroganoff stains. Fortunately, it’s a simple fix. Head to your local office supply store, pick up some wipes that are specifically made for electronics, and make it a point to wipe down your keyboard and monitor daily. Not only will it keep dust and debris from gumming up your computer, but it also helps keep germs at bay.
3: Declutter Your Desk
If you’re like many people, your desk probably acts as the kitchen table for your office. It’s the place where everything gets dropped, and pretty soon you have to dig to get to your computer. A clean desk will guarantee more productivity, but you’re already so busy trying to be productive, who has time to stop and clean? The key is to schedule it daily, and treat it like it’s a meeting you can’t miss. It helps if you minimize the tchotchkes and picture frames and only keep work essentials on, in and around your desk.
2: Assign a Place for Everything
The key to making cleaning your office easy is to put everything in its rightful place. So, this means that you need to assign a place for everything and label it clearly so you can find it in a pinch. Once you get in a habit of putting things away, decluttering becomes a quick task that’s second nature. This also means not filling up every single inch of storage. New items will come into play and need a place to live, so keep a few empty shelves or drawers to make room for the new.
1: Get Rid of Junk
The magnet business cards, the colorful array of cheap pens, the coffee cups, the calendars — all freebies that you just couldn’t say no to. Now, they’re strewn all over your desk. It may seem like stuff that’s useful, but really it’s just stuff that clutters up your space and makes you feel guilty for throwing it away. We know it’s hard to resist free swag, but learn to just say “no.”
Why are we talking about this? Cleaning may not be our focus, but it is an important part of the story for returning to the workplace after the COVID 19 pandemic. We’ve collected some of the most useful research to help you navigate the right way to manage some of the common safety concerns as you go from remote work to reopening the workplace.
Once everyone returns to work, we’ll find ourselves thinking differently about the equipment and surfaces around us, reaching for disinfectant wipes where we’d never give a second thought before.
While it’s understandable to experience a little apprehension as we venture back to the office, it’s achievable and valuable to keep our common spaces healthy. Whether engaging in maintenance cleaning, or CDC-advised disinfection for exposed spaces, office cleaning practices come down to the same basic tenets: The right equipment, a solid plan, and a team.
This COVID office checklist will help you collect the right materials for your everyday routine, establish a thoughtful plan, and put it in place in your office with help from your team.
While our reaction to the virus has been (understandably) to default to “disinfect everything,” in everyday situations the CDC guidance recommends cleaning rather than disinfection. What’s the difference? In short:
• Cleaning is for routine health and wellness. Washing down surfaces using a green cleaner or a simple soap-and-water solution can make them safe by removing dust and dirt. This also physically removes germs by picking them up (either in a paper towel or cloth) to safely remove them.
• Disinfection, on the other hand, kills germs by means of a chemical process. The CDC recommends disinfection only when when a risk is present someone has been working in or visiting the office while carrying a contagious illness; it doesn’t have to occur for routine cleaning.
Also, in any cleaning or disinfection routine, it is important to read and carefully follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Never mix cleaning agents. Doing so can be harmful or even fatal.
Gather the right cleaning tools
Depending on the reason for cleaning (simple cleaning, deep cleaning, or disinfection) you’ll have a few items on your checklist:
☐ Nitrile gloves (latex can cause allergic reactions in some individuals)
☐ Paper towels, or microfiber cloths (if you can wash and sanitize them after use)
☐ Green cleaning spray
☐ Disinfecting wipes, spray, or a correctly-diluted bleach solution
☐ Trash bags
☐ For disinfection: A properly-rated respirator mask and protective gown
Create an office safety and health plan
To create a cleaning routine, it helps to think about the typical hotspots that transmit bacteria and viruses.
1. Make a note of the traffic through certain areas of the workplace, and the ways in which space is used-or not. In the course of this mental inventory, you may even uncover ways to improve or maximize your space usage as a side-benefit to your cleaning plan development. For instance, you may find areas you don’t need to attend to for cleaning purposes. They may turn out to be underutilized real estate.
2. Look through your office one area at a time, and note the high-touch areas in each. Some of the typical transmission vectors in spaces include:
• Tables and desks
• Countertops
• Chair-backs
• Doorknobs
• Light switches
• Cabinet pulls and handles
Some of the other high touch areas in your office spaces to consider:
Front desk and reception areas
• Phones, computer mice, and keyboards
• Desk accessories such as staplers, tape dispensers, and pen-cups
• Digital touch screens
• Elevator buttons
• Coat-racks and hangers
Kitchen and break rooms
• Appliance handles and controls (fridge, toaster, oven, dishwasher)
• Fixtures
• Chair-backs at seating areas
• Coffee station and coffee/tea service items
Bathrooms
• Bathroom fixtures (toilet handles, faucets, soap and towel dispensers)
• Waste-bins
• Door and stall handles
• Changing stations and convenience item dispensers
Conference and meeting rooms
• Technology controls such as speakerphone buttons, remotes
• Televisions, touch screens, and projectors
• Whiteboard accessories such as pens and erasers
Mail and resource rooms
• Postage meters, scales, and dedicated shipping computers
• Packaging and mail tools such as tape guns, letter openers, box cutters
• Rolling package bins, trolleys, and carts
Develop an office cleanliness plan
Following a regular cleaning and disinfection schedule for the workplace is the best way to maintain the hygiene of your spaces and the health of your colleagues.
While no cleaning schedule is one-size-fits-all, a daily practice of cleaning high-touch areas, along with an intermittent practice of deep cleaning (including things like upholstery, window treatments, and carpets) and sanitizing surfaces can create a healthy environment year-round.
When to increase office cleaning frequency
Sometimes you may increase or augment your normal cleaning and disinfection practices:
• During local outbreaks of transmissible diseases or illnesses
• During “peak” season for influenza, or at the beginning of the school year (a time when the common cold finds a foothold in households)
• During large-scale events in the office: holiday gatherings, stockholder or board meetings, all-hands events, etc.
• When someone goes home sick from the office with something transmissible
Don’t skip the dusting
It’s tempting to focus solely on areas where hands or respiratory droplets may travel, but dust can be a vector for illnesses like COVID-19, cold, and flu. An “airborne” disease achieves its fast spread by hitching a ride on dust particles and aerosolized moisture. Besides reducing the spread of illness, improving your indoor air quality can make breathing easier for those with dust allergies, asthma, and other respiratory sensitivities.
Promoting good workplace hygiene
In the wake of social distancing, getting every employee on board with office hygiene likely won’t meet with much resistance. Even so, there are several ways you can encourage each employee to keep up these healthy habits once things start to settle into the new normal. Provide a checklist for guidance including:
☐ Encourage good hand-washing and respiratory hygiene practices within your workplace.
☐ Discourage presenteeism in the office – consciously create an office culture where it is “okay” to work from home or take the day off when you’re feeling ill.
☐ Keep supplies stocked and readily available. Make sure supply cabinets are well marked.
☐ Place disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer, paper towels, waste bins (for easy disposal), and face coverings at strategic spots in high-traffic areas.
☐ Make space-hygiene practices a regular part of corporate communication.
☐ Get your staff into the habit of pitching in – proactively wiping down surfaces they use (even when they’re healthy), making recommendations on cleaning practices, supply levels, or areas in need of attention, etc.
☐ Provide a channel for the above improvements and service requests, either through a formal ticketing system or simply an email with a dedicated gatekeeper.
☐ Consider automatic or “touchless” office upgrades that reduce contact, such as:
• Motion-detecting light switches
• Entry and in-office doors
• Towel dispensers and hand-dryers
• Soap/sanitizer/lotion dispensers
By sharing your COVID 19 checklist with your staff, they’ll understand how important keeping people safe is to their employer, making it more likely they’ll follow protocols.
Implement social distancing practices
How should physical distancing actually work in the office? More space between desks? Fewer people in the office?
We recommend planning now, so you understand the impact of physical distancing on your workplace.
Creating robust social distancing guidelines must also consider what happens over time. Where in the early days of our return to work, it may feel more natural to keep distance. Using solid communication plans, offices can ensure that as things relax over time, staff will ease into the new normal of office life while still keeping mindful of the important health concerns involved.
Robin’s desk management software is a good example of incorporating tech to maintain social distancing requirements in the workplace. Robin’s seat assignments support one-to-one desk and employee ratios and help admins safely space out desks.
A few examples:
Plotting out what seats can be used and identifying average office capacity.
Staggering the number of seat assignments per day to maintain proper social distancing protocol.
Using exports, teams can keep track of which desks have been used more often than others and by who in order to maintain a safe and clean environment.
Using adjustable booking policies, managers can restrict access to book certain desks, clearly displaying what is and isn’t available on a map to their team.
The final touch? For companies looking to give their people the freedom to choose where they want to work, people can book their own desks when they decide to work in the office.
It’s not just on the employer, though. Here’s what your staff can do to help maintain social distancing:
Provide self assessments: Being aware and honest about your physical health is one of the first and best ways to reduce the spread of coronavirus. CDC guidelines list what respiratory symptoms to look out for.
Wear a mask or face covering. Masking should take place any time physical distancing of 6 feet is not possible, or any time you will spend more than 15 minutes in close proximity to others (for instance, when you must gather in a conference room for more than a quick check-in).
Bring your own resources: Another way to minimize the spread is to consider bringing personal computer peripherals to and from the office. A keyboard, mouse, laptop, etc. can be easily transported in a backpack, and make it much easier to wipe down your work-station at the end of the day.
Have a plan in place for contact tracing
Knowing who has been in the office, and with whom they’ve interacted can help mitigate the risks of infection in the event of a COVID 19 outbreak. Having a well-communicated contact tracing program can make the office space experience feel safer by offering transparency about important health information.
Though employers are lawfully allowed to ask employees about symptoms, they must be careful (as with any health condition) to protect the privacy of both COVID-positive employees and those potentially exposed.
In the event of COVID 19 symptoms, employers need to be able to answer a few questions:
When was the ill person last in the office?
Who did they meet with while on-site?
Where were they sitting in the building? Where did they spend time?
From there, individuals who may have had prolonged exposure to the infected individual can be contacted to begin the CDC-recommended quarantine procedure to limit the chance of spreading infection while their own Coronavirus status is determined.
As with employees who are sent home after a health screening, providing options for paid leave or flexible work is important.
Many organizations are using technology to jumpstart their contact tracing process. For example, with Robin’s analytics tools, office admins can easily identify when an individual was in the office, where they sat, and who else booked desks around them to expedite contact tracing.
With Robin’s people export, it’s easy to see when someone was in office and who sat around them to jumpstart the contact tracing process.
Office safety and health: Keep a good thing going
Coming up with a plan and covering all the necessary areas is a great first step in promoting a healthier, cleaner office environment . Once done, the objective is to maintain that level of enthusiasm within the office. Make healthy environments part of your overall wellness culture within the office, and promote the ideas in this guide when the opportunity arises.
The continued spread of the flu and new coronavirus (COVID-19) further demonstrates the need for workspaces to be clean and healthy. Luckily, the act of cleaning and then disinfecting a surface dramatically reduces the chances of infection spreading.
“Businesses need to step up their efforts to make sure their workplaces are disinfected regularly and properly,” says Afshin Cangarlu, CEO of Stratus Building Solutions. “There are specific cleaning tools and methods and a right and wrong way to tackle disinfection that could make or break the health of employees.”
Here are five tips on disinfecting an office, according to Stratus Building Solutions:
1. Use a one-way wipe down
Wipe down a surface in one direction and don’t go back over it in the opposite direction because it will deposit germs that were just cleaned up. Routinely wipe down all frequently touched surfaces such as workstations, countertops and doorknobs.
2. Practice color-coded cleaning
Color code cloths for specific spaces so janitorial and custodial staff doesn’t cross-contaminate — don’t confuse kitchen cloths with the bathroom
3. Know what chemicals can do
On the bottle, common household disinfectants tout their ability to kill 99.9 percent of bacteria and viruses, including human coronavirus, flu strains, E.coli and salmonella, among others. But will they work against COVID-19? The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says these disinfectants are “thought” to be effective against the new coronavirus strain, but until tests confirm it, this has not been scientifically proven.
4. Tech disinfect
Don’t forget to wipe down high tough surfaces on an employee’s desk, such as their keyboard and phone.
5. Heavily promote handwashing
Post handwashing and drying signs throughout the office – from the kitchen to the bathroom – to remind employees to clean their with an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60 to 95 percent alcohol or with warm water and soap for at least 20 seconds. Dry hands thoroughly because germs spread with moisture.
A clean office can clear the mind and increase productivity. In fact, disorganization and clutter can cause workers to have extreme anxiety when making decisions, according to Psychology Today. It can also make them feel burned out and reduce their ability to concentrate.
An article on Business.com offers a few simple steps on how to maintain a clean and organized workplace.
Cleaning regularly is a key component to cultivating a positive workplace. Tidy workspaces will encourage tidy minds.
Hiding electrical wires and chargers can make a big difference. A surge protector to keep all the cords charged to the same outlet can cut the clutter. If the work desks have open back, put the wires in that opening.
Unless using paper is a must, businesses can go digital and decrease the amount of paper it uses and recycle what is no longer needed.
Organize a workplace audit to determine what items, paperwork and supplies are truly needed. Determine what is used every day, what is used once in a while and what is never used. Create separate piles for trash, items to keep and items to donate.
Research has confirmed that clean, well-organized workplaces promote happy employees, according to CleanLink reports. A survey conducted in November 2018 found a large majority of manufacturing employees identify operational efficiency (96 percent), safety and hygiene (94 percent), and organization of work environments (93 percent) as top enhancers of their happiness on the job.
Cleaning was playing a large part in the pandemic because everyone wanted to be as safe as they could. People were now getting assistance when it came to cleaning their homes, offices, and every other place with a large gathering of people. At the start of the pandemic, people were not open to meeting one another with a higher chance that they would catch the Coronavirus but as time passed, with the improvements to healthcare and people getting vaccinated, the Government started making some changes so people could start meeting one another.
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