The most important thing about the maintenance of your home lies in the fact that it requires both regular effort and seasonal massive projects to keep the place clean. Why? Well, vacuuming the place may be something you use once per week, chances are that you aren’t vacuuming your curtains and window blinds each time. Such a thing would take too much of your time, thus making this routine operation into something that consumes too much time. Sure, you have 10 minutes to vacuum your living room every Sunday but would you set aside 30 to 40 minutes for vacuuming alone? Fortunately, there’s no such urgency when it comes to these tasks. This is where the necessity of a massive spring cleaning lies.
Carpets, Floors and Doormats
If you have no idea where you start, focusing on the ground level and then scaling up is as good of an idea as any. Cleaning your carpets and upholstery should be your first step and other than regular vacuuming, you might want to try shampooing them with a specialized carper cleaner or outsource this task to someone else. The most complex thing about this task lies in the fact that you’ll have to move (or elevate) your furniture. You also need to open the window in order to speed up the drying process, which is one of the most important reasons why this is done in spring.
Once you’re done with this, you should clean and finish your floors. Wooden floors, especially in parts of the home like kitchen are exposed to so much wear and tear, so, waxing them or applying a sealer may be a great plan. This is something that you should do only occasionally, due to the fact that new wax coating tends to stick and hold for a while.
As for the doormats, what you should do is wash them, swat them with a broom or just shake them a bit. Regardless of what you choose, you’re unlikely to lose more than several minutes of your time. Seeing as how this is something you do once or several times each year, this is something that may easily slip your mind.
Clean Behind Furniture and Appliances
Seeing as how you’re already moving items and furniture pieces to clean the floor, you may also use this opportunity to clean behind furniture and appliances. The amount of filth that will gather here might be appalling, which is why you probably shouldn’t use the same mop and water that you use for the rest of the room. Keep in mind, that the dirt you see here had months to accumulate, which means that no matter how bad it looked, it’s hardly surprising. As hard as it may seem now, this is probably the hardest part about the spring cleaning.
Walls, Cabinets, Baseboard and Woodwork
As I already suggested, you need to start going up and the next item on your list should be your walls. Unlike floors which are expected to attract dust, soot and grease, walls are an unexpectedly dirty element of your home. Fortunately, it doesn’t take any sophisticated equipment to clean them and all you have to do is get a sponge and start working. A sponge and a mop are virtually all you need and the reason why it’s so important that you do this in spring is due to the fact that you get to air the room, thus A) drying it more quickly and B) avoiding the risk of mould appearing.
It’s Time to Declutter
You would be amazed at just how much you managed to hoard since the last big cleaning. The problem is that finding mental endurance to recognize the item that you’re not going to use on a regular basis and immediately throw it away is harder than you think. Therefore, you need to make a major effort and throw all these unnecessary items at the same time. Sure, donating them and recycling them would be an ethical thing to do while selling them online would be a smart thing to do. Unfortunately, you’re on a tight schedule and under risk to postpone this task indefinitely. To avoid this, look for an available dumpster rental, get the bin of adequate size and start throwing things out.
Get Everyone Involved
One hack that will help you get things done a lot quicker, as well as make the entire process somewhat more enjoyable is the idea of involving the entire family. Delegate tasks carefully in order not to overburden or insult anyone, put some music on and try to gamify the experience. In fact, by pulling all of this off, you can easily create a scenario in which this becomes a family-bonding activity, even a family tradition, instead of it being just a tedious chore. With everyone on board, things will be over in no time.
Don’t Pollute Your Home (More Than You Have To)
One piece of advice that you won’t encounter nearly as often as you should is that using dangerous cleaning chemicals within your home might not be the best of ideas. Sure, in the bathroom, you can feel free to go with commercial cleaners, but when it comes to your kitchen, using home-made solutions is a better option. By this, I mean products made of vinegar, lime, baking soda, soap and similar, non-hazardous ingredients. You would be surprised at just how effective these elements tend to be.
In Conclusion
At the end of the day, you need to resist the urge to leave it all for the spring cleaning. Just because you’ll wash your walls during the spring cleaning, it doesn’t mean that you can just feel free to ignore the stain on the wall for weeks and months until this point arrives. Moreover, the more you get to do over the course of the year, the less work you’ll have during your spring cleaning. At the moment, this may not seem as much but in just a couple of weeks, you might feel incredibly thankful for making this extra effort.
You might also like to read:
• 3 DIY Cleansing Solutions for your Home
• How To Remove Mould Stains From Wood Floors
• Quick Ways to Clean Your Vinyl Siding
• Have a Spring Ready Backyard in 5 Easy Steps
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