Spring Cleaning Tips

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Home Spring Cleaning Tips

How To Spring Clean Your Home

Springtime brings back the sunshine and everything comes back to life. The birds start chirping again. Your spirit is light, but what's that? Dirt and cobwebs in the corners? If your house is untidy and unkempt, it cannot be a source of inspiration for you to work with enthusiasm during spring.

It follows that if you are to welcome the spring, your house has to be clean. That is why it is called spring-cleaning. In every civilization of the world, there is a time that is ordained for cleaning the house and this is just before the lazy days of summer begin.

The following tips can be useful to you when you do your spring-cleaning.

Before You Start

Even before you get started spring cleaning, there are a few things to consider so that cleaning will be finished quickly as possible.

• Wear your comfortable old clothing that you won't mind if it gets stained dirty.
• Check your cleaning supplies. Don't wait until you' are ready to clean and find that you don't have any oven cleaner.
• Assemble your supplies and put them in a bucket to take with you when you clean. Items such as cleaning rags, all purpose cleaner, glass cleaner, cleaning rags, feather duster, disinfectant, and furniture polish.
• Get rid of the junk. Hold a garage sale. De-clutter your house and garage to turn trash into cash.
• Pick a weekend and start your spring cleaning. Many hands make light work. Reward the team with dinner at a pizza parlor. You can also hire a maid service to handle this for you. I can recommend a very good one!

1. Make a list: Make a list of all things you would like to replace, fix or give to charity, and prepare a budget if necessary.
2. Take one room at a time: It does not matter how many rooms you have in your house, you cannot do your house in a single day even if you have only two rooms. It is better to restrict to one room a day so that you are not tired at the end of the day one and have enough energy left for day 2 and so on until the last day.
3. Open the doors let the fresh air in: open all the doors, let the fresh air in, start some music and start working in the room. The temperature before onset of spring is pleasant enough for working without air conditioning. This will also ensure that the chemicals from the cleaning fluids will go out of the enclosed space.

1. Have a top down approach: Start cleaning from the roof. If you have a false roof, start with the area from above the false roof. This will reduce cleaning efforts. Chandeliers, ceiling fans are hardest to clean, tackle them first.
2. Wash draperies in each room separately: Wash the draperies after you have cleaned the room and refit them. After the room is complete, close that room and do not open unless necessary. This will maintain your privacy and at the same time ensure that the dust migration from room to room will not affect the cleaned room. If you have Venetian blinds, clean those with wet cloth after you have dusted the room and vacuumed the carpet.
3. Sort the useful and useless: In each room, sort the items you wish to keep and take away everything you do not wish to keep. Open all the drawers and cupboards, and take out all the material that you have not used for a long time and you are not likely to use, and separately store it for garage sale or charity.
4. Do not throw away all papers in a room at a time: Collect all the papers that you have in each room and organize them in two groups. One you wish to keep and other you wish to throw away. Do not throw them away just not Collect papers from all rooms together and keep them that way until you are ready to sort out all the papers.
5. Make a sell/charity list: Collect all the items for sale charity in a room list it out and show the list to all members of your family. May be someone has some feelings attached to it and may want to keep it as a memorabilia. Respect his/her feelings but if the item looks valueless to you convince him/her to discard it. This way all the members of your family will develop the habit of uncluttered living, at the same time they develop feelings of items that they can keep items as memorabilia. When everything useless is collected together, every thing looks useless. Allow every member of your family to take out only one or two items from that collection
6. When in doubt, throw it out: Do not keep useless things. Unless you take a detached look at each item, you will not be able to decide. When you are in doubt throw away without further thinking. Chances are you will never need it in future. By the time, you need it in future it will have been upgraded.
7. Clean computer inside out: Take a close look at your computer. Do not have your computer turned out in a digital dumpster.
8. Recycle it permanently: If you are, a firm believer in keeping things for use “just in case” you might collect many items that you will not need. That “just in case” is a temporary feeling and the earlier you get over it the better for you. Otherwise, be warned that you will collect so many items that you yourself would be the only useful item in that pile of junk.

Therefore, keep spring-cleaning fun. If you can involve your family members with cleaning, it will be just like the outing you are planning during the summer.