It's a beautiful fall day and we washed the windows. The husband took the outside and I took the inside. Here's a guest post by the husband. I'll follow up later this week with the homemade cleaner and inside of the windows.
Cleaning the Outside of the Windows
--Guest post by The Husband
The first mistake beginning window-washers make is to start right in on washing the windows. You see, we build to that. Before you wash the windows, you need to wash the window frames. It's no good having clean glass surrounded by a frame of caked-on dirt. That's like getting out of the shower and putting on your sweaty work-out clothes. Or something else equally disgusting and counter-productive.
The first thing you do is remove all the screens. Put them over somewhere away from the windows (more on this later). Then take a bucket of warm water with just a tablespoon or so of laundry detergent in it (you don't want gobs of suds; you just want a little something to bring down the surface tension of the water so it moves dirt along better). Go over all your window frames with a coarse rag or a scrub brush. It's OK to work quickly; your goal at this point is just to remove any thick deposits of dirt that would otherwise foul your glass-cleaning water in a big hurry. Also don't worry about sloshing water on the glass itself--we'll get back to that.
At some point you'll need to wash the screens. The same mild detergent-water solution that you used on the window frames will do. In fact, it's probably better to wash the screens first, because they're less dirty. Then you can use the same bucket of water on the window frames. Just wipe the screens down gently (it helps to use lots of water) and clean off the frames. Then hose them down well. Be careful not to break anything--they don't make screens (or anything else) the way they used to. Further proof that everything is better the way it used to be. Lean the screens up against a fence or something to dry. Whether you wash the screens before or after the frames, the important thing not to do is wash the screens after you do the windows. Especially it is important not to do this right underneath the windows that you just finished buffing the streaks out of. Because then, hypothetically speaking, you'd probably be splashing water on your clean windows. This would require extra buffing. In theory.
After you've cleaned the screens and frames, you're ready to wash windows. I use two buckets; one for "dirty" water, and one for "clean" water. I fill both up with a a couple gallons of one gallon hot water to one cup ammonia. I put a squeegee in the "clean" bucket, and a coarse rag in the "dirty" bucket. Working one window at a time, first I scrub the glass down with the rag. You can use a sponge, but I believe you get better feedback from your fingertips on how cleanly a rag is moving over the surface of the glass. Feel free to use lots of water. The trick to avoiding streaks is to finish your work before the water air-dries on the glass. This is why it is generally recommended to wash windows on a cloudy day. Otherwise your wash-water evaporates too quickly.
After one pass with the rag, I go back over the window with the squeegee, using the bucket of cleaner water. My squeegee is a gas-station type with a scrubber on one side, so I use that first. Then I squeegee the water off. My dad taught me to do this in long passes, from top to bottom, to avoid drips. You can do whatever your dad taught you to do. After the squeegee, take a sheet of dry newspaper and buff out any drips, spots, or streaks. Newspaper works like gangbusters (kind of like mythbusters, but way tougher and with more tattoos) on glass. Don't be stingy with the newspaper--it's cheap. And once a sheet gets damp, it doesn't work as well. After your first window is clean, move on to the next one--just be careful not to splash water on any previously-cleaned windows in the process.
I am told that one should clean the outside of the windows with vertical strokes, and the inside with horizontal strokes (or vice-versa) to make it easier to tell which side of the glass any remaining streaks are on. Depending on how high your standards are, and how much free time you have, you can go back over the windows after the inside and outside have been washed, and police for stray streaks. Personally, if it's at all difficult to tell which side of the glass a teeny little streak is on, you can probably live with it the way it is. Just turn your back on the streaks, leave the room, get a good night's sleep, wake up early the next day, work hard at your job and be productive, come home, change diapers, feed stubborn children, bathe them, eat with one hand while holding a baby, put the kids to bed, enjoy a very large, very cold martini, and you will find the next time you pass by that window, the streaks will be much less troubling to you.
And that's how it's done. See SL's post for instructions on the inside half of the job.
TH
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