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Pesach Cleaning Got You Down?

I hope you all enjoyed my prank yesterday! That is the only successful prank I’ve ever done. I am physically incapable of playing a prank because my face gives it away every time. Enter…the anonymity of the interwebz. If you have no idea what happened, check out this explanation: What Is a Rick Roll? And no, I’m never gonna give you up.

Back to your regularly-scheduled blogging…
I hope you’re readier for Pesach than I am. Granted, I don’t go crazy and try to combine Pesach prep and spring cleaning. (I’m also a pretty detailed cleaner throughout the year, so it’s not that dirty. Yes, even the baseboards get a monthly cleaning. I may be insane.)

Don’t let Pesach cleaning and preparations get you down. It’s not as hard as people make it sound. If you want a time estimate for how much prep time you need, check out Out of the Ortho Box’s handy flowchart. Despite being tongue-in-cheek, I think it’s true.
Personally, I like this item-by-item approach to Pesach prep: How to Do Your Pesach Cleaning Cheerfully in Less than One Day. (Note: your community/rabbi’s standards could be different than printed here.)
If you decide to go all out, this is what you will look like:

And this is what “going all out” can look like: 

Disclaimer: Take all of the above with a grain of salt. I was pronounced as “lacking an appropriate fear of chametz.”

Comments

  1. Wow, you need a better guide! That one kinda rubs me the wrong way when it says things like "If you don't have a self-clean oven, it's best not to kasher your oven, just tape it up and don't use it"…Seriously? It's really not that difficult to kasher an oven. :

  2. Sadly, this is the sanest (and most easy-to-follow) guide I've seen. As my chavruta wisely said, every chag tests a part of our yetzer hara. Pesach brings out our most machmir/judgmental/fearful traits.

  3. Okay, that's a guide that doesn't make me feeling like just burning the house down.

  4. The end when it spoke about chumrahs was really great, actually, so I will give it that. I really agree that we don't need to go more than necessary for pesach and that's how I'm doing my apartment.

  5. In Israel, many are accustomed to not cleaning ovens, unlike in the US.

    In addition (or possibly as a source), the Israeli ovens also can be a bit harder to clean than the American ones.

    There is also a famous guide from R' Sheinberg floating around many different places; see, for example, http://www.orchos.org/torah/chagim/pesach/pesachcleaning.html

    All of them are rooted in a very simple principle: any piece of chametz less than a kezayis is not a problem if it's not near food. Any piece of chametz, regardless of the size, is not a problem if it's pagum [ruined] through the use of a household cleaner. But, any non-spoiled chametz is a problem if it gets into food ON pesach (as opposed to before).