Hmm... are you standing on top of things or adjacent to them? All cleaning methods affect neighbouring tiles but not your own! Let me know if it's still not working and something else is going on.
Now that you mention it though, I think I forgot to say that in the help screen, and even then it doesn't really make sense for picking things up. I added the ignore-own-tile exception for repairing things so you're never trying to fix a piece of furniture you're on top of, but it doesn't really make sense for the other cases. I'll do an update on that when I have time over the next few days!