Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning is something very few people do anymore. It simply is not as needed and we don’t have the time. But the goal of spring cleaning- to have a pleasant and sanitary home down to the walls- is still valid. 

Our grandmothers did this by taking everything out of the house every year (literally moving out!), washing and repainting the walls and furniture, and putting everything back inside, cleaning and repairing it as they went. 

This is way more than we need to do today. We are not dealing with homes heated with inefficient wood stoves (even our fire places burn much cleaner today), and most of our surfaces have at least a thin coat of plastic to make it easier to keep them clean.

I advise a much more moderate approach; continuous cleaning.

1)   Pick a room to start in. You can use the beginning of you cleaning circle (a path that ends, preferably, at the kitchen where you hit every room with as few back tracks as possible).

2) Pick the first item on the left, totally empty it and then move it away from the wall.

3)   Wash the wall.

4)   Wash and repair the piece of furniture you moved out.

5)   Put it back where it belongs and put everything that belongs back in it.

6)   Donate or throw away the things that you don’t need anymore. Put up the things that belong somewhere else.

7)   Continue around the room and around the house and yard.

8)   When you come to a closet, just take part of the things out if you can. For example, empty just the shelf, clean it, throw away 75% of the stuff that was on it, put the rest back (80% of the stuff in closets and other storage places in the average American home is never used again). Then empty the bar. Then the floor.

Do just one or two pieces of furniture and accompanying wall a week. When you are done, start over. 

It will probably take six months to a year to go over the whole house this way, but you never have a major disruption of the household and nothing ever gets very dirty. You can live in a clean house all the time.