Spring Cleaning Time!

One of the things I like about being involved with projects like Life Well Lived is that it forces me to stretch a little bit out of my comfort zone and write about rather irregular topics: things I otherwise would never dream of writing about. So today’s post won’t be about economics or politics or strange stuff from the news or even funny pictures. Today I’ll be answering a serious question:

What are your favorite spring cleaning tips? Do you have any to add to Alicia’s 10-minutes-or-less list?

Ok, Who’s Alicia? Fair question. Alicia wrote this post on 10 Minute Spring Cleaning Tips. She’s got some interesting points that might work well for a family, but probably aren’t as helpful to people who live alone (or just plain end up doing all the housework themselves for whatever reason).

Ironically, guests at my office meeting this week included a cleaning company, whose advice for Spring Cleaning was simple: Hire us!

Now it’s worth confessing that I don’t do Spring Cleaning beyond opening windows whenever the weather is nice. Nope. The one thing I do that comes close is “Oh nuts we have guests who will be staying with us” cleaning. This involves making sure the guest room is clean with fresh sheets on the bed, putting out towels where guests cannot help but find them, and making sure that bathrooms are squeaky-clean.

I just simply don’t think that saving up the cleaning for Spring is a good idea. Most of the stuff that falls onto the list are things we should be attending to regularly in small doses rather than one marathon session. Sure, sometimes clutter builds up and needs to be swept away. “I can’t find a damn thing in this drawer” is a better excuse to clean a junk drawer than “It’s SPRINGTIME!!” Sane people clean out the fridge when they get home from the grocery store with more stuff, because otherwise the new stuff won’t fit! Sure, sometimes something falls through the cracks and gets forgotten. There’s no need to wait until Spring to take care of it.

In short, if you spent 10 minutes a day doing cleaning and maintenance around your home, you won’t have to make a big deal out of Spring Cleaning: it will already be done.