It’s coming to the time of year when we can say goodbye to winter and start to enjoy the longer daylight hours and warmer temperatures, but before you start getting excited, there is one aspect that spring brings that may bring you out in a cold sweat: the spring clean. Traditionally, spring cleaning was an essential part of annual house maintenance to refresh the home after months of being heated by coal and wood fires and lit by candles. On the first warm and dry day of spring, every piece of furniture was taken outside for the home to be given a thorough cleaning, but now our homes are heated and cooled with modern systems that don’t produce the soot and mess from yesteryear, why do we still do it?
The modern home is air-tight, and as such, a potentially toxic environment that needs freshening up just as much as ever. Here is a guide as to how to tackle your spring clean.
The bedroom. On the first warm dry day, your first port of call should be to the bedrooms within your home. Strip off the bed linens and launder them. Take pillows, mattresses, comforters and blankets outside and lay them in the sun. Be sure to balance the mattresses on chairs so that both sides can have the air circulate around them. This will be the end of the road for the dust mites and the allergies they promote. A day in the sunshine will freshen up your bedding, and it will feel like new.
The bathroom. For the bathroom, you need to remove all towels, mats and washcloths and wash them in a high temperature. This is important to kill any of the bacteria that has built up over time. Remove your shower curtain and take it outside to hose it down and scrub it to remove any mold. Check your cupboards for out-of-date products and put them in the trash. You can purchase discount health and beauty products to replace them safe in the knowledge that you are not compromising your health by using old products. Be sure to pay attention to cleaning the air vents in your bathroom—they are magnets for dust and dirt.
The kitchen. The kitchen always takes the longest to deep clean. Its very nature means that it is a high traffic room that combines with the detritus of cooking and steam to make it a haven for bacteria to grow. Clean your oven; over winter your cooking typically involves more slow-cooking and roasting, so the oven can suffer from a build-up of stubborn grease that requires elbow grease to shift. Remove all items from the cupboards and clean them. Use this time to reorganize your kitchen so that it allows you to work more efficiently within it.
Start from the top of the house and work your way down. Dust and vacuum all curtains and drapes and wash the windows inside and out. Everything that can be moved should be, so that you can dust and clean all surfaces—this goes for heavy furniture too. Once you have dusted, wiped and mopped, open all of the windows to get that fresh air into your home, and you can really start to enjoy spring.
Photo by Jason Briscoe
Mia Guerra
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