The spring cleaning bug has officially hit, and everyone is dying to get their houses tidy and clean. One thing I feel like we all forget to do is to actually prepare for it.
Wait, I have to prepare to spring clean? What kind of sorcery is this? Yes, friend. This is a big step we don’t do, which is why spring cleaning seems so daunting.
But there’s a way to make sure we rock it out when we spring clean. These are the top 3 tasks I do before I get down to scrubbing the house.
How To Make Spring Cleaning Easier
Declutter First
Listen. Decluttering and organizing are NOT the same thing. The actual definition of declutter is “remove unnecessary items from…”, which is not “arrange into a structured whole.” Organizing is what you do AFTER to get rid of al the crap that doesn’t serve you.
Declutter like a crazy person. Pair down your wardrobe, get rid of random items in your garage, recycle those old magazines. Decluttering will take you time, but it will make spring cleaning so much easier once it’s done.
Set A Timer and Be Strict
A timer will be your absolute best friend when tackling that long spring cleaning list, and even decluttering. Set a time to get your decluttering done, and be extremely strict about it. You can’t help but make decisions and clean intentionally when you only have 15 minutes to do it.
Collect Your Supplies
Find all of your supplies that you’ll need to use when spring cleaning, and put them in a special corner of your home. We think we know where everything is that we use during spring cleaning, until it’s go time. Set a timer (yup, again), and grab up everything you use to spring clean. Do you use your own DIY cleaner? Make more of it, so it’s ready to go when you’re ready to go.
Get High and Get Low
Get up on a step stool, and look around your rooms. Where do you need to clean up high? Now, get down on the floor and look around. What areas are you missing by not looking from these vantages? This has been a game-changer for me in our new home, because there are so many more spaces that I can miss. Change your vantage point, and find the secret places you need to spring clean.
Delegate Like A Boss
Girl, you should NOT be cleaning all the things. Every family member needs to pull their weight when it comes to spring cleaning. Give each member a section to spring clean, and give them a list of items that need to be cleaned. Yes, you may have to take time to teach your kids how to properly deep clean, but then you are working yourself out of a job in the future.
One Thing To Do After Spring Cleaning
Oh, yes. There’s one essential thing you need to do AFTER spring cleaning, and this is the best time to do it. Once you are done with spring cleaning, or are in the midst of it, write down all of the things you spring cleaned.
Here’s why: you’ll have to do all of this again in the fall. This will help you not stress about your fall cleaning tasks, because you’ve already done it all!
One cool example is that we deep clean our grills in the spring, so it’s something we do again in the fall before we put them away. I also deep clean the oven in the spring, since we don’t use it as much in the spring and summer, then it gets another cleaning in fall before I go to town using it.