Spring Cleaning Tips & Tricks – Make your Home Sparkle
Spring Cleaning Tips and Tricks to Make your Home Sparkle
It’ that time of the year again! As spring approaches, you’ll want to start thinking about your yearly spring cleaning. Spring cleaning is a time-honoured tradition meant to signal the end of winter and give the house, garage and any other outbuildings you have a thorough top to bottom scrubbing, as well as getting things organized for summer. There’s no better time of the year to spend a weekend cleaning, and you won’t regret it once the sunshine arrives.
In this article, we help you tackle the dreaded but rewarding spring cleaning. We will cover the main components of cleaning your home so that it feels more organized and sparkles. With these tips and tricks, you will be able to get your home in order in no time at all.
Defeat Soap Scum
Cleaning your bathroom is never fun. There’s a lot of icky buildup and tight spaces that require a lot of attention. Soap residue builds on your shower door every time you take a shower. You can proactively beat soap scum build-up before it’s a nuisance by coating glass shower doors with a product design for car windshields. Apply a rain-repellent product to create an invisible barrier that causes water and soap suds to run off towards the drain, preventing any substance from building over time.
Oven Cleaning
Cleaning an oven is so cumbersome that most people only do it once a year. Food, grease and oil find their way onto the racks, the walls and bottom of your oven every time you cook. There are a ton of oven cleaning products, all of which promise the same ease and cleaning efficiency but might require you to apply harmful chemicals that take hours to work.
Instead of relying on harsh oven cleaners, try a wet pumice stone (yes, that’s right, a pumice stone!). It will remove the caked-on dirt and grease, and works quicker than most oven cleaner brands without the toxic chemicals.
To clean your stovetop, there are all sorts of methods, including using hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, salt and baking soda, vegetable or olive oil, ammonia, boiling water and more. Check out 11 ways to clean your stove and cook top for all the methods.
Wash Walls, Cabinets and Baseboards
Spring cleaning tends to put the focus on floors, bathrooms and carpets. To thoroughly clean your home, you’ll want to go that extra mile and focus on walls, cabinets and baseboards. To clean your walls, you want to be mindful of the paint or wallpaper. Start by cleaning a small test area to make sure you aren’t doing any harm. For best results, get a bucket of warm to hot water with a healthy amount of regular dish soap. Using a microfibre cloth and a used green scrub pad start by giving the area a vigorous wipe down with the cloth, and for marks that don’t come off with the cloth, use the scrub pad with very light pressure. Then hit the area with the cloth again to remove any particles the scrub pad removed. While this works well, you need to be careful that you’re not using too much pressure, as you don’t want to remove paint, you just want to remove the marks.
For cabinets, you may need to use a cleaner designed for the material of the cabinets. For instance, if you have unpainted wood cabinets, then use a product specifically made for wood. If it’s painted and clear coated, then you can use normal dish soap in hot water. Make sure you don’t scratch the surface by using scrub pads.
For baseboards you can use the same method as the walls – but you’ll obviously have to get down on the floor. By thoroughly wiping away dust, dirt and scuff marks, the room will not only look better, but it will also be more hygienic.
What ever cleaning method you decide to use, just remember to do a small test area so you’re confident that you won’t wind up destroying the surface area by cleaning too aggressively.
Floors
Floors can be made from a variety of materials, and each has its own cleaning practice and standard. For ceramic-tile floors, vacuum first, then use hot water with a touch of dish soap or all purpose cleaner. Use your favorite mop, the spin mop works really well. If you want to clean by hand, with a cloth, then wipe in a circular motion so that you don’t leave streaks. Use a small brush to clean the grout where required.
If you have hardwood floors, use super-hot water with a bit of cleaner like murphy’s hardwood floor cleaner, this cleans and helps protect your hardwood floors, and leaves them with a nice shine. One thing to be careful of when mopping your hardwood floors, is to watch how wet you get them. Too much water can cause warping and other issues, depending on what type of hardwood they are made of, and if they are laminate vs solid hardwood.
Organize with Storage
Cleaning doesn’t just mean scrubbing and mopping. It’s a time to organize different rooms and remove any lingering clutter. Those old 8-tracks…your children’s arts and crafts projects…tax documents from 1992…it’s time to get organized and throw away all items without purpose.
To quickly organize your home, make sure you add waste baskets to rooms where trash accumulates like your family room. Your family room probably needs the most work since it’s your home’s version of Union Station. Adding a cabinet that matches the style of the room is an ideal way to make sure magazines, books, toys and papers aren’t scattered around. Make sure your family knows to put everything in the cabinet once they’re done.
Turn closet space into storage centres by adding shelves or storage units with multiple drawers. Adding additional cabinets or drawers to a home office can also help combat the issue of paper clutter.
No home has ever been worse off by adding more storage and emphasizing organization.
Replace Old Light Bulbs
Spring cleaning is a good time to give your home some nice touches or small upgrades. To brighten up your home, you should install new light bulbs that will make your home look new. A small touch like this can work wonders.
Replace old light bulbs with low-wattage, energy efficient LED bulbs. These bulbs can deliver a more natural light, which has been known to lift moods. When you shop for bulbs, make sure that have the “daylight” label and contain a range between 5,000 to 6,500 kelvins.
Gamify
This idea isn’t for everyone but if you want to get your kids involved you could try turning it into a game. If it worked for auctioning abandoned storage units on Storage Wars, it could work for spring cleaning. Offer small rewards for completed tasks, set a timer, create a leaderboard or a point system to motivate the kids to roll up their sleeves and get to work. At the very least, it’ll turn a full-day job into an afternoon of fun.
Conclusion
Spring cleaning can be a great way to get your home in tip top shape and get rid of dirt & dust and re-organize your space. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to give your home a facelift. Best of all, it can set the tone for the summer and make you feel like hosting again!
Give some of these tips a try and we’re confident that you’ll get the spotless results you’re after. Cleaning doesn’t have to be torture, if you have a plan, know what you’re doing and enlist a bit of help. Happy cleaning!
