Spring Cleaning Tips: Getting Your Home Spring-Ready for 2019
With February almost over, spring is nearly here! Soon enough the weather will warm up a bit and the snow will subside for rain! Spring is a great time of the year with more opportunities to get outside and enjoy the change in weather. It might be a good idea to start thinking (or working on) your inevitable spring-cleaning items. In this post, I’ll outline a few things you may forget about that you won’t want to miss this spring!
Decluttering -
Perhaps one of the most tried and true spring-cleaning methods, the declutter always makes a big impact. Because of the tired winter feeling, you might find yourself with a lot more stuff this year compared the previous year. It’s easy to do, with the holidays and the shorter days, we naturally forget about things and those things lead to clutter. Find some inspiration from Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, a master declutter-er, who has some pretty actionable tips for the clutter-prone household! Prioritizing and sorting your declutterization is a helpful step and can also help you reduce your carbon footprint! While in the midst of a declutter project, sort your items into the trash, recycle (or donation), items to be put away and those that need to be fixed! One great principle to keep in mind when de-cluttering is the idea of SPACE: sort, purge, assign a home, containerize, and equalize. I touched on a few of these earlier but the idea is touched on a bit more in depth here.
Sprucing Up -
Post declutter, you might want to pay extra attention to the areas of your home that don’t frequently get cleaned in your normal routine. It’s easy to forget these parts such as the walls, ceilings, curtains and even the outdoor areas like underneath your deck or patio. Another green home cleaning tip is to mix vinegar with equal parts water, you’ll save money in the long run, it’s easier on the environment and is still a powerful household cleaner. How long has it been since you cleaned the inside of your refrigerator, washer, dryer or freezer? If you can’t remember it might be a good idea to include this in your list. While we are really good about getting the surfaces clean on a frequent basis, it’s easy to forget the inside of our appliances.
Maintenance –
Household maintenance like gutter cleaning or power-washing concrete and decks are perennial favorites for spring cleaning and often times are extremely satisfying. However, the spring is a great time to do some maintenance to the bones of your home as well. Systems like plumbing, HVAC, electrical even could often use just a bit of help to run more smoothly, the planet and your wallet will thank you with just a bit of effort. As far as the plumbing goes, take some time to note if you have any leaky faucets or running toilets as these fixes are typically pretty easy and can be done in about 10-15 minutes with some handy help from YouTube. Another thing homeowners typically forget about is flushing their water heaters if they have a tank style model (like these ones). Water heater flushing is typically recommended at least once a year to reduce the sediment and debris build up and preserve the structural integrity of the tank. YouTube comes in handy again with a fantastic video on how to do this effectively. Spring is also a great time to replace your HVAC filter. Experts typically recommend replacing the HVAC filter every 3-4 months as, over time dust, dirt and debris gets caught in the filter and causes your system to work much harder to do heat or cool your home.
Cleaning your Digital Life –
Email inbox overflowing? Notifications and app updates driving you crazy? Spring is a great time to sit down and start to reoptimize your digital devices. Start with the easy ones on your computer, putting anything you most definitely won’t use in the trash and then organizing the files you will use into proper folder structures that make logical sense. From there take on the apps you don’t touch on your phone. Getting rid of these will give you more space for music or photos and will help that mess of a home screen! Google photos is a great app that can help make more space on your phone for photos, it backs up your current camera load onto the cloud so you can delete them off of your device while being sure that they exist somewhere else!