Today we are going to dive into spring cleaning together!
You know all of those little tasks that as you go throughout your day you think, “Oh, I really need to clean up this baseboard.” Or “I wonder what is behind my refrigerator?” “Wow, that wall is really smudged, and has a lot of handprints on it.”
But in the course of your day, you really don’t have time to take it on. So, that is what we’re going to do in this spring-cleaning challenge. My friend Emily McDermont took my spring-cleaning list and put it together in this lovely little PDF. We made it so you can add your own tasks to it too and you can follow along as we go through and check things off each week.
So, up first is the whole house section; baseboards, lights, fans, washing windows and sills, dusting the blinds, washing walls, and shampooing rugs. We’re going to start there going through our whole house doing those tasks that need to be done, and then we’re going to dive in in coming weeks to the kitchen, the living room, bedrooms, bathrooms, and office-specific tasks.
The first step are the baseboards. I’m going to use this Swiffer duster that has this extendable handle to reach down and do all the baseboards. And then I’m also going to use this to do lights and ceiling fans.
As we go along, I’ll also do some picking up and some decluttering, which I have kind of already started. And we can definitely get more into this when we dive into each specific room. If there’s any low-hanging fruit, just take care of it now!
I’m starting upstairs going through all the baseboards up there and then I’m working my way down. I feel like you always want to start at the top and work down when you’re cleaning so that you can kind of knock the dust and dirt downwards.
I honestly cannot get over how sparkly and clear the lights above the kitchen island look now! It’s so funny – it was less than five minutes of work to clean them and every time I walk by, I’m just amazed!
After baseboards, lights, and fans, now I’m going to go back to do all the windows and windowsills. For today I’m just going to be washing the inside of the windows, cleaning the blinds and shades as I go through.
A really helpful tip when you’re cleaning is to have a great playlist to listen to. So, today I’m listening to the ‘Fearless’ re-recordings by Taylor Swift, and that is helping keep my energy up and keep me going. I’d love to know; what is your favorite music to listen to when you’re cleaning? Let me know in the comments down below!
This wasn’t on my list, but the stairs were just so dirty, I had to take care of them before I could continue with scrubbing the walls. There are definitely still some greasy spots, and I could not get the paint spots off. It looks so much better than it did, so I’m happy with that.
The last thing on my list for this spring-cleaning section is shampooing the carpets, which is going to require vacuuming them all first.
The day I was planning on tackling the carpet cleaning, our water heater went out. Apparently, this one is quite old so we need to get it replaced. But that threw a wrench in my cleaning plans because I need hot water for the carpet cleaner. I was doing some planning, making a quick list of all the rugs that I want to clean. We have the living room, which is what I’m calling the front room of our house. And then the room that has the TV has a really big carpet and I want to clean that. The dining room carpet, office carpet, guestroom carpet, storage closet carpets. By storage closet, I mean the former guestroom, since we actually switched those two rooms around, as I’ll show you in the video
The boys are loving sharing a room and it’s gone so much better than I expected!
I took the opportunity to take a break from my spring-cleaning list and focus a little bit on the mudroom, putting away some winter stuff. Going through the hats, gloves, and boots and taking care of some of that stuff. I’m calling this ‘procrasti-cleaning.’
I don’t even know how it’s possible for our carpets to be as dirty as they are!
We did a lot of research to find the right machine for us because we have so many rugs over the hardwood floors and you can’t use a rug doctor on those. And we really don’t have a place we could take our rugs to get cleaned. At least we couldn’t find one in our area. So, after a lot of research, Brian found this machine that uses a heater to simultaneously dry your floor or it helps dry your floor after you go over it. So, that’s how we can use it on our wooden floors, and it seems to be working really well and it definitely gets a lot of dirt up.
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And that is it my friends, for this week! If you join in this challenge, I would love to see how it’s going for you. You can download the checklist and also follow along on Instagram. Happy Spring Cleaning!
