Your Spring Cleaning Checklist

How to Deep Clean Your House With These Spring Cleaning Tips

An overall spring cleaning of your home brings a new start. You should spring clean your home at least once a year to give your home a makeover, to cater to hygiene purposes and to begin the year with a fresh start. That’s why it is called a spring cleaning. It’s best to do it at the beginning of the warm season so that the basics are done. You will only need to then do light cleaning for the remainder of the next three seasons for maintenance. Here are some spring cleaning tips and a spring cleaning list.

The Basics of Spring Cleaning

People typically give their homes a major clean once a year to save time and energy throughout the rest of the year. By deep cleaning curtains, carpets, floors and cupboards once a year, only maintenance cleaning needs to take place.

Main areas to include and check for spring cleaning:

• Check for infestations
• Bathroom
• Kitchen
• Bedroom
• Living area
• Closet
• Garage

Busy people can usually only cope with basic home cleaning because of other responsibilities, like work and raising families, as these activities can take a lot of time. It is important to do this task once a year to save time, but mostly for hygienic reasons.

This is a good time to get rid of insect or rodent and bird nests that may have been lurking in dark corners, ceilings or garages. Grime becomes embedded over time, too, creating a health hazard, which is another reason to tackle it once a year. Managing fungus build-up is also important (particularly black mold) which is extremely dangerous to our health.

Tackling Molds, Fungus and Nests

Getting rid of molds, fungus, bird, bat or rodent nests in the home requires a specialist. Any insect infestations should be dealt with by professionals who can safely work with poisons. The same applies to deadly black molds and other fungi in the home.

Always call an expert to get rid of bird, rodent or bat infestations in the ceiling because this can lead to a serious source of disease. Once you have taken care of this, then you can move on to more normalized cleaning, such as cleaning your bathroom.

Cleaning Your Bathroom

Make sure you clean your bathroom and toilet tiles after the mold and fungi have been removed. Use a toothbrush to get into all the joints between tiles. Also, use a bleach to disinfect these areas as the bathroom is a place that should always be clean and hygienic.

Remember to clean your faucets, cupboards and wash the curtains and windows. This is probably one of the quickest rooms to clean in the home, so start here first before moving to the kitchen.

Cleaning Your Kitchen

This is probably the toughest job in the house because the fridge, freezer, stove, microwave and other kitchen equipment can often be neglected. Get gloves and the appropriate cleaners for your stove and other kitchen equipment.

Use environmentally friendly products and disinfectants throughout the home as much as possible. Move equipment where possible to clean walls and floors. Be sure to clean your smoke extractor over the oven because a lot of grease collects there.

Start emptying food and crockery cupboards. If items in your fridge are expired, toss them. Clean and disinfect all the kitchen cupboards from top to bottom and corner to corner.

Clean all your crockery that has not been used for months. You’re spring cleaning, so you need to be brutal about what can stay and what needs to go. It’s okay to keep some items that have sentimental value, but when these begin to move past the 10 item mark, you should make some tough choices.

Cleaning Bedrooms and the Living Room

It’s impossible to clean a home if you cannot see what is going on in bedrooms and living room areas. Loads of junk can collect over time that can take up space and collect dust. If you have not used the item in a year, give it away. Get yourself organized with separate boxes. Mark these “throw away,” “sell clothes” and “sell other items”.

Get the kids to mark a box for their own bedrooms and supervise their spring cleaning. Some items may no longer fit, so they need to go into the trash. Collect the other usable items in separate boxes. You can later organize a garage sale over a weekend to get in some extra cash or donate these usable items to a local charity.

Organizing Closet Space

After you have gotten rid of unwanted items in bedrooms, sitting and dining rooms, you can start the cleaning process.

Give the walls and floors a wash down. Wash curtains and rugs and get into closets for some serious deep cleaning. This is the time to do some maintenance as well. You can even fix loose screws and railings.

If you do not yet have a collection of wonderful plastic or wooden closet organizers for storage, now is the time to get that sorted too. Using plastic storage containers is a wonderful way to keep items dust free and the entire room looking neat and tidy.

Cleaning Up Your Garage

Spring cleaning tips includes hitting the garage, which may be an easy part of the home to spring clean, depending on your levels of discipline, and whether or not you hoard things. Separate items into what can be discarded or sold.

Using a variety of storage solutions in this area will also make your job much easier. If you can hang bicycles or other exercise and outdoor equipment to save space, then do this. Otherwise, plastic storage boxes, wooden shelving, hooks and other methods can be used to neatly store garage items.

You should also be able to remove your cars from the garage and readily see where everything is that you need. Additionally, you should be able to identify where everything is that you need without needing to open 20 boxes to find a specific item. If you can accomplish this goal, your garage and home spring cleaning will have been an enormous success.

For more great spring cleaning tips, sell your items to bring in some extra cash. You can also look forward to a year of basic cleaning to keep your home in tip-top shape.