Ep. 158: Housecleaning in the Philippines

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 158, House Cleaning in the Philippines. So it's summer, and at my house, summer means five kids are out of school and at home a lot. And that means there's a ton of mess being made and there's a lot of cleaning going on. We usually clean bedrooms really well. We usually clean our mudroom and their cubbies really well, where they put all their stuff when they get home from school. We usually. We clean our yard really well. We usually clean our pool room really well. We usually clean our bikes really well. Like once a week there's a lot of cleaning that goes on and then we go on vacation and you come back from vacation and you have to clean up after that. Cleaning is something we all do. It's universal. We all have brooms and mops and some of us have pressure washers to help cleaning things. So in the Philippines, let's just talk about their brooms. So they use brooms, sort of. So in a previous podcast I talked about Filipino cinellas, their flip flops, and how they have multiple flip flops for different uses. They have the same situation with brooms. Also, they have an inside broom and an outside broom. So here's what. This is interesting and I hope we can get this picture in this video of these brooms. Here's what Julia says about it. She says most of us have plants and trees in our yards. A rake works, but it can't go into tight spaces or uneven terrain. A typical broom would break if you use it on mud or wet dir. A Wallace Ting ting, which is made by binding up dried up spines of coconut leaves, is the best tool for the job. She left this out, but I'm pretty sure she means outside. The shape and flexibility of the Ting Ting make it easy to use in tight spaces. It's also strong enough to be used in mud and even push water to clear out puddles if needed. And then inside, she says, we like the floors inside the house to be really clean. That's why we don't allow shoes and outdoor slippers inside the house if possible. The floors inside the house have to be so clean you want to walk barefoot. A regular broom can't sweep the fine dust that we can feel with our feet. A Wallace tambo, which is made from corn fiber or weed fibers, has really fine hairs that can sweep those up. The tambo is so good at sweeping fine particles, we Use it every day. And before mopping, the tambo removes as much loose dirt as possible. Then you use a mop to clean up the dirt that sticks to the floor. Most older houses have wooden floors. To clean and polish them, we have our leg powered floor polisher called the Bunno Bunat. I don't really know. It's a half dried coconut husk that you use to scrub and polish the floor. The modern version of this is a floor pad made from woven coconut or plastic fibers. If you want to make your floor shiny and have your leg, your leg day workout, polish your floors with a bouno. Not really sure how that works or how that's pronounced. I'll just give you some of my, I'm going to add to what Julia says here. So older houses have wood floors which in the US a wood floor is like really, really awesome. But we have these engineered woods or these fake woods that, that are really well done. In the Philippines. In a newer house you're gonna have tile. Tile is way cleaner, easier to manage. That's, that's what most people are gonna have. And then they're gonna mop it wet, wet. And that's how, that's how they clean their places. A very tropical climate. It's very wet. It's also dirty. And so to have the house be clean is needs to be a wet clean. And this is a common occurrence to wet clean the house in the Philippines.