How Clean is your House

I'm not a big fan of the How Clean is your House series - there's seems something intrusive and voyeristic about it. But I do like Kim and Aggie and they seem to have an encylopeadic knowledge about all things cleaning. Knowing how informed they are is partly why this book (How Clean is your House - hundreds of handy tips to make your home sparkle by Kim Woodburn & Aggie MacKenzie) is such a disappointment.

Remember when you were at school and you got given homework to do along the lines of 'write 2 pages about what you did in your holidays'. And you forgot all about it until the following week so spent your morning break writing 2 pages in your BIGGEST HANDWRITING to fill the pages as quickly as you can? Well, that's what this book feels like. There are lots of headings written in large font that seem like fillers, so although it is a fairly large book the content could probably condensed into something a third of the size.

I could overlook this if the content was useful and jam-packed full of tips but it isn't. Most of the advice offered is pretty basic, such as this gem about cleaning a fireplace: 'ensure fireplaces are unlit before attempting any kind of cleaning. If the fire is alight you could easily burn yourself, or inadvertently set fire to your clothing'. Mmmmm.

After a while the pager headings start to irritate too: 'How clean is your Bed/Wardrobe/Bathroom/Bidet etc etc' and failed to hold my interest.

I've struggled writing this review because I wanted to champion Kim and Aggie, but this book really was a big disappointment. I know they've written lots of other books so I'll have a look for another of their titles and do a review on that but in the meantime my advice would be to give this book a miss.