Shine That Chandelier

By Chan Boldene

You’ve been putting it off for months now. Or even longer. You glance up at the chandelier that hangs majestically over your dining room, and the glass crystal jewels have lost their shine. The luster is dull and unattractive. Those glass crystals no longer sparkle when you first flip the switch. The grime and dirt and gunk and grease of the hot summer days and long winter months is starting to show up on your beautiful fixture.

But you also realize that cleaning it could potentially be a major undertaking. You think about hiring or ordering one of your kids to do it, then realize that he’ll break something if he’s left with the glass alone for too long. So, then you decide to break down and grab a rag to clean it yourself. Okay, where do you start?

Take a few minutes to plan. Grab a small ladder, a drop cloth, a bucket of warm water, some detergent (what you use to wash dishes should be fine to clean the hanging jewels), an all purpose cleaner and/or metal polish, and a couple of clean rags, and a drying towel. The fastest way of cleaning all of those hanging glass pieces is to remove them the chandelier first and soak them in water.

If your chandelier has glass crystal jewels, you can use warmer water than if you have plastic crystals. Water is your best friend and will take most of the manual labor out of your cleaning schedule.

Now that the crystal pieces are soaking in the bucket of water, you have more free space to clean the stems and the metal. Be thorough. Clean the metal well. Step back and take a look at your job before you rehang the jewels. Take your time in this step as you don’t want some family wise acre to remark, “you missed a spot.”

Now comes the fun part. With your rag, clean each jewel separately and place them on the towel. After you have a dozen or so, dry them individually so that they’ll shine, then hang them (or wait to hang them altogether). You’ll get more of a sense of accomplishment if you hang a few at a time.

By the time you’re done cleaning all of the pieces and have rehung them, your bucket of water should be thoroughly dirty. So, to prevent this grime buildup in the future, you need to spend a few minutes a week dusting the chandelier.

Dust that fixture weekly, and you’ll keep the sparkle and brilliance of your glass jewel crystals (as well as the metal stems) for a long time. It’ll look clean and fresh, like you’ve spent hours cleaning and polishing the chandelier. No one must know any different.

Mr. Boldene is a technical writer and writes about many subjects. Read more of his blog at Shine That Chandelier. For more information on other Chandelier subjects. visit Chandeliers

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