9 Spring Cleaning Hacks
If you’ve put aside a day for some rigorous spring cleaning, then you don’t want to open your drawers to find that you’ve got minimal bleach left and one manky-looking sponge. If you’re about to write ‘spring cleaning day!’ on your calendar, then we recommend that you go and check up on your personal cleaning stock first.
We can’t tell you how much you’ll need because this will change depending on the size of your house and the amount of accumulated dirt that you’re going to be cleaning away. A good start would be a full bottle of bleach, a bottle of spray cleaner, some dish soap and some fresh sponges.
If you have sensitive skin, don’t forget to invest in a pair of gloves and stock up on moisturiser, too.
A superior spring clean will interrogate all questionable items in your home. You need to ask yourself whether the item has use or ornamental value. If the answer is no, then you need to throw it away or hide it away somewhere.
Beware! This part of the spring clean is the most draining part and can be quite time-consuming. It can even cause arguments if you accidentally throw away something that doesn’t belong to you. It’s important to check with the people in your house before you throw things away.
If you can complete this task before you start your proper spring cleaning, then there will be less stuff to move when you’re cleaning surfaces, so it’s important to get this out of the way before you pull out the sponges.
This is linked to ‘Throw Out Your Clutter’, but here we aren’t talking about generic ornaments and objects – we’re talking about a tendency to hoard supplies. If you have more than two bottles of shampoo just for you sitting in your bathroom then you’ve probably just had a birthday or Christmas celebration, and they’re causing clutter. Regift or donate them, but don’t let them stay in your bathroom making you sad because everything feels messy and disorganised.
Don’t let yourself hide them away in drawers either; a true spring clean will go through all the drawers and refresh your stock. If you keep hiding unwanted gifts that you’re never going to get around to using, you’ll end up with bottles from five years ago stashed away and forgotten about.
This is important not just for bathrooms and toiletries, but for old tins, even crockery – are you still clinging onto an incomplete set of tableware that you already replaced and doesn’t get used? Get rid of it! Question how much of each thing you need and start clearing out the excess supplies.
Recycling is great and very important, but it can take up a lot of space in your home and make it look messy and cluttered. If you’ve succeeded in clearing out a cupboard or two by throwing out (or using) your excess supplies, then you can transform one of these free spaces into a place to hide your recycling while it waits to be collected.
After throwing out all that extra stuff, you’re sure to have a lot of recycling on your hands already – so this is a great time to reacquaint yourself with current recycling practices and find somewhere to store all your glass, tin, and plastic.
This is especially important for throwing out clutter, but you should get them to help out with the cleaning itself, too. Since you’re the one looking at this spring cleaning guide, we can assume that you’re the most pro-active cleaner in your home – if this truly is the case, then you might not be satisfied with the level of cleaning that everyone else works towards. Fear not, because we have a hack.
Assign everyone in your house a room to start cleaning. When everyone is happy with their room, everyone rotates and attempts to clean the room to a better standard than the last person. This will ensure that everyone takes responsibility for the whole house and the things that bother different people get cleaned away to their satisfaction.
You could rotate to a timer to make sure no-one goes insane working on the same room for a whole day.
Here’s an infographic we made a while ago about who is more likely to end up with the chore of spring cleaning:
Since you’ve already de-cluttered your entire house, there’s hope that you won’t get distracted by items that hold a lot of nostalgia and threaten to disrupt your productivity, however, there’s still a chance.
If you time yourself while you clean, you can keep an eye on how long you’re spending on the process. This should help you to identify when you’re taking too long on a particular task.
If you’re living by yourself or were unsuccessful in getting the rest of the house to help out, then we recommend completing your spring cleaning one room at a time. This means that even if you don’t finish the entire house in a day, you will have some spaces that are complete which you can congratulate yourself on.
A great spring clean is more than just tipping baking soda onto the latest red wine spill, it’s about making your home somewhere that you love to be in again. To reinvigorate your home on every level imaginable, you should invest in some new room fresheners to give your home some exciting new smells.
Start by having a sniff around your home and identify any rooms that smell particularly musty. These are rooms that you should focus on. Open the windows for a few hours and later spray some air freshener, light a candle or get some incense going.
Everyone has a preference to which smells they want in their home, but we recommend clean and airy smells to give your home that ‘recently cleaned’ fragrance. You can even make your own air fresheners with some water (200m), rubbing alcohol (30ml), and a few drops of essential oil (about 10 drops).
We understand that sometimes, a spring clean doesn’t have the effect you were hoping for. The property might be clean, but something about it looks tired. In this case, it might be time to bite the bullet and start planning a renovation.
We have a huge range of titles, including our beautiful Grespania kitchen tiles, for walls and floors. Get in touch with us about your preferences and budgets soon.
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