Last weekend brought us daylight savings and an hour less of dark skies. When we fall back, I definitely love the extra hour of sleep I get to enjoy, but when I’ve been on the downhill winter slump of early dark nights and the cold, I fully enjoy springing forward since that means summer is surely approaching! Which do you prefer?
Yesterday I opened up all of my window treatments to bring light and warmth into my house – and BOY did that moment make me feel like I needed to dust! Having natural light enter my house is one of my favorite things – I’m definitely a sunshine girl and love to be in it, so when I can let the light into my house my heart is happy. I also felt like I needed to really deep clean my house since the winter brought in so much snow, ice melt, gravel, etc. It’s hard to believe that the first day of spring is just days away! So, while we’re here together on this fine Monday, I’ll share with you some excellent spring cleaning tips that maybe you’ve never thought about!
- Our porch is a wintery hot mess. It’s the first spot to get into to enter our home so anything and everything is there. Bits of gravel, sloppy snow, boots, gloves, hats…. You get the picture. Sometimes the best way to clean a room is to literally take everything out of it. I swept, mopped, got down on my hands and knees with an ice cream bucket filled with warm water and vinegar (my grandma taught me vinegar gets rid of orders and is an excellent cleaning agent) to get into every nook and cranny that I possibly could get to: baseboards and other woodwork, corners, tops of the doors, and the walls. And wallah: My once disastrous porch is now a welcoming sight! If you have any other hard-surface floors throughout your home that get used a lot (i.e. : laundry room, bathrooms, mudrooms, etc) you can do the same for these spaces.
- The kitchen is the second most used space in our home during the winter (other than the living room for binge watching) : It’s where everyone gathers for drinks, food, and games. As you can imagine, when the grill isn’t being used, the kitchen gets all the cooking messes. An oddly satisfying cleaning method I’ve found is to take a toothpick around my oven and the oven door. There’s tiny little spaces between where the glass and plastic meet where bits of food and grease somehow get into. Slide the toothpick through those tiny spaces and you’ll either be wow’d or disgusted that food could get into there! But you’ll definitely be satisfied knowing that it’s clean now.
- If you don’t already do this, you really should: Grab an ice cream bucket with some vinegar (again, thanks Grandma!), an old rag, and a step ladder to clean the blades of your ceiling fans throughout your home. You probably haven’t run your ceiling fans much through the winter, so there’s going to be a good amount of dust and grime on the blades, so wipe those suckers down. If you have some sort of glass around your light bulbs on the fixture, take those off and wash them in your kitchen sink to bring them back to life as well.
- Remember taking those screens out of your windows to prep for winter? Well, if you’re positive that it’s not going to snow anymore after the first day of spring (big LOL because this is Iowa and we’ve gotten snow in May before), then go ahead and place the screens back in the windows once you’ve cleaned them off from dust after they’ve been sitting in storage all winter. While at the windows, take the opportunity to remove any window treatments that you can toss into the laundry to wash – I can guarantee you the tops of them are probably pretty dirty. If you have wood or faux wood blinds, bring your trusty ice cream bucket of vinegar water with you, a rag, and a pair of tongs (yes, you read that right) to pinch between the slats to clean those as well. If you have honeycomb blinds or anything else that you can’t get wet, a good dusting of those will work like a charm!
Spring cleaning is no fun task to take on, but if you do it room-by-room, it doesn’t seem as daunting. My personal favorite to crank out major cleaning is to have Alexa belt out some Shania Twain songs. Singing and dancing to clean is really the only way to get the job done well! “Man, I feel like a woman! Ba-ba-da-da-dam, bum bum!”