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The best way to welcome spring is by throwing open the windows, gathering the family around, and preparing your home for the new season through a proper cleanup. An undertaking of this size will seem daunting for a myriad of reasons, but these tips will help you visualize your clean home and give you the tools to achieve your goals.
From preschoolers to young adults home from college, there are cleaning activities for every child. The trick, however, may be convincing them to take part in those activities. Two ways of incorporating children into household cleaning are incentivizing and creating chores.
Chores are great for younger children requiring less convincing to pitch in, and incentives are great for older children now being looped into cleaning routines. Creating a chore chart or incentive station will be the best way to help these now-eager participants understand your expectations.
Cleaning blinds, light fixtures, baseboards, vents, and any other troublesome area should be done first. Before you give those baseboards another scathing look, remember that now is the time to tackle them!
Taking time to specifically address your least favorite tasks from the start makes everything that comes after look like a piece of springtime carrot cake. Vacuuming? Easy. Changing all of the bed sheets? No problem. The best is yet to come.
Before you bog yourself down for hours in the master bathroom, think of what specific tasks you’d like to accomplish through your entire living space. If floors are important to you, wash all of the floors at once. Windows, furniture, electronics, and other surfaces are able to be done in one fell swoop and keep you from losing too much time in one area.
Doing one activity at a time will also help you feel less frazzled during the cleaning process. A large-scale clean of the home can feel like too much to take on, but doing one task at a time will make the process more manageable and turn the complicated into simple.
Spring cleaning shouldn’t just be about dusters and mops – use this time to sort through your belongings and get a sense of control over them. By identifying the key areas where items accumulate in your home, such as closets, mudrooms or garages, you will know where to begin.
Tackle these areas by clearing them completely. Sort through each belonging and use the six-month rule: if something hasn’t been touched in six months, you can safely part ways with it. This may exclude seasonal items, so reassess these special pieces and determine how likely you are to use them in that time. Decorative or utility items can be set aside and donated to local charities. Tired linens, towels, and bedding can be donated to local animal shelters.
When restocking these areas, create systems. Place like items together and make sure anything that is used often is easily accessible. Use tools like organizing bins, lazy Susans, or item-specific racks to establish and maintain order.
Spring isn’t the only time to maximize your cleaning efforts. When cleaning is complete, take stock of the areas in your home and create a regular cleaning schedule.
Allocate small tasks on weekdays such as dusting, vacuuming, and organizing. Larger tasks for the weekends will minimize effort in the future. Monthly tasks can be larger activities that may require more than one person or are time consuming.
Be sure that your schedule aligns with any schedule made for children and seek opportunities to clean with them on a weekly basis, thus creating quality time while keeping the house clean.
