Tiny House Tanzania-Cleaning

One of the great things about a tiny house is the fact it takes a lot less time to clean because there is less house to clean.  In many ways that is also true here in Tanzania.  There is a lot less house to clean, sweep, and mop up.  Cleaning up is something you also tend to do more regularly-at least for me.  For example, I don’t have a lot of dishes, pots and pans because I don’t have a lot of room to store them.  Because of this I tend to wash my dishes right after each meal.  I will need those same items for the next meal.

There is one way in which cleaning a Tiny House in Tanzania is a bit more difficult.  I want to point out I am specifically talking about one in Tanzania and I expect cleaning a normal sized house in Tanzania would take a lot longer than it takes for me to do this same task in my Tiny House.  The area in which I am talking has to do with cobwebs and insects.  We don’t have air conditioning, so the house is built to be more open.  In addition, the construction techniques don’t create a tight a home like we would be used to in the States.  Another major factor is the lack of pest control services out in the rural areas.

Most of the more rural homes factor in a bit of just living with it.  For example, there are no real windows so no windows to clean.  They don’t worry as much about dust entering the home because the floors are often dirt.  As they start to build more permanent homes and less nomadic structures some of that will start to change.

I am at the beginning of that switch over, so construction ideology has not caught up with the new idea of home.  What does this mean for cleaning of a tiny house Tanzania?  It means I need to sweep out cobwebs almost every day in my house.  At least three times a week.  Cleaning dust that gets in through open windows is also a daily task.

The biggest hurdle for a clean house though deals with insects remains in the house, especially with the termite swarms that happen during the rainy season.   I mentioned the house is not sealed like one would be in the states.  That includes the windows that have no caulk around them.  I saw the live termites pushing the dead termites under the window frame into the house.  Fortunately, I have very little wood in my house.  Just the doors and the strips of wood the roof is nailed to.  The roof trusses are made of metal because it is cheaper.

The problem arises from the fact the dead insect bodies are all in my window tracts and I have no access to a vacuum cleaner to suck them out.  They piled up so high one week that I could not close my windows.  So how to clean them out of those tracks on a regular basis.  I used an air pump with the balloon nozzle to force air into the tract and blow the debris into the air where either it will go into the house and I will sweep it out or it blows outside where I would sweep it anyway.

During the rainy season this needs to be done once a week and the rest of the year I can get by with once a month.