Product Description

Hundreds of handy tips to make your home sparkle from the stars of the hit show How Clean is Your House? Kim and Aggie have taken the nation by storm, watched by over 4 million viewers every week as they transform filthy holes into gleaming palaces. Here, their fabulous tips for every cleaning situation imaginable are compiled, sweeping through a house from top to bottom, fluffy marigolds, big hair and lots of white vinegar at the ready. Filled with advice, fun and 'Kimmisms' - Scrub dear don't tickle - it's the perfect present for any home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1689 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In How Clean is Your House Kim Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie "The Nation's Dream Cleaning Team" continue the mission of their popular Channel 4 television series--to educate, inform and generally browbeat us all into cleaning properly. The double act (dubbed "Trinny and Susannah on Domestos" by one pundit) need little by way of introduction. Kim, who wears pearls and sports the type of ridiculous Beehive-cum-wasp-nest hairstyle that hasn't been seen on the box since Bet Lynch graced the Rovers Return, is the bruiser. To ladle on the 70s TV trivia, Woodburn is Bodie to the finicky wee Scot Mackenzie's Doyle--if The Professionals had been a pair of hygiene-obsessed middle-aged women and forgone the pleasures of driving Ford Capris through cardboard boxes choosing instead to give the u-bend a good going over.

Here Kim and Aggie do actually include a series of Crime Files; factoids of horrifying information, usually about "beastly bacteria", which are destined to make you at least question, briefly, the wisdom of opting to leave your dishes soaking overnight after that joyously wine, port and a whisky or seven-for-the-road-fuelled dinner party. "When you let dirty plates sit for a long time the food contributes nutrients for bacteria, so they will rapidly multiply". It's therefore best, they suggest, to "wash all dirty dishes in hot soapy water as soon as possible." (Paper plates are, of course, always an option.) Divided into chapters that cover each room and full of astonishing top tips, such as using a banana skin to dust plants ("the dust" apparently "clings to the skin and the juice nourishes the leaves") it will have you on the way to meeting their notoriously exacting standards. But, a note on the back of the jacket kindly reminds us to give this volume "a dust every now and then" and under no circumstance use it "as a coaster or a dinner tray." --Travis Elborough

About the Author
Aggie MacKenzie has worked on many national magazines, and was associate editor at the Good Housekeeping Institute, where all the latest appliances, cleaning products and gadgets are tested. She now writes a column for The Times. Kim Woodburn is a professional cleaning lady, and has kept house for Hollywood moguls and even a sheik in Kent.

Customer Reviews

Great advice for EVERYONE!
Contrary to some other reviews here, I would like to personally vouch for this book as advice for everyone! It has some fantastic little tips and hints on how to keep your house sparkling!

Yes it has advice for the really filthy people like on the TV show, but it also has some great little bits of advice for those of us who want to be able to make chores quicker and easier, and dare I say it, more enjoyable, from little simple things you might not think of, such as using two buckets when mopping the kitchen (one with clean water, one to drain out into), and putting cut lemons in the microwave on full power for 3 minutes to loosen dirt and make the microwave smell lovely, both simple little things you might not think of, but which will help your routine, to help for specific little problems, such as how to get fingerprints off walls and how to stop bathroom tiles getting watermarks!

So go ahead and give this book a try, it's got lots of solutions, suggestions, as well as general little bits of advice from Kim and Aggie personally, it's certainly helping me on my path to becomng a domestic goddess... or at least it's helping keep my home clean, fresh, and pleasant, in a new easy and enjoyable way after changing my thinking to that of Kim and Aggie!

Great tips
How clean is your house? is such a fantastic book to have, as it contains lots of really useful tips and advise on how to keep your house nice and clean. Aggie and Kim don't just use comerical cleaning products, they use things like lemon, white vinegar and newspaper to clean things in the house. If you missed out on the show get a copy of this book, it will change your life! If you watch the show (like me) get a copy as well, as it's nice to have their tips close at hand.

A great read
I loved the TV series and I enjoyed the book, which was written in a similar vein. I cannot believe that people really live in the disgusting mess that the TV series portrayed, so think that probably they may have been encouraged to do no housework for weeks before the recording -however....if you want to stop buying expensive chemical rubbish to clean your home with and go back to more natural products that are to hand in the kitchen anyway - this book is for you. The cost of the book will be saved many times over each year thanks to not having to buy 5-10 different advertised products a month to clean your home. Many of the tips I have tried clean far better than preparatory ones and quicker.