As we head toward the end of the official winter months, the ideas concerning spring begin to flourish. One thing on many people’s minds as the freezing chill melts away is the spring cleaning tasks they have ahead of them. Spring cleaning can be cathartic after a winter of holing ourselves up inside, but it’s certainly not the most fun task to imagine doing. To ease the transition, we’ve come up with this list of common mistakes made when spring cleaning. Avoid these, and the whole process will go much smoother.
Trying To Do Too Much
Spring cleaning can seem like an insurmountable task, depending on how much you have to clean or how big your house is. If you try to clean every single part of your home over the course of a weekend or two, you’re probably going to burn yourself out. Make sure you set realistic goals for your spring cleaning. Consider focusing on specific areas in your home or decluttering rather than cleaning if you have too much stuff.
Not Making a Plan
One of the most common mistakes made when spring cleaning is wasting time because you don’t know how to be efficient. A good plan can make all the difference. Planning out your cleaning route can make the task much easier in the long run. You won’t have to wonder where you’ve already cleaned or what you still need to do in what room because it will all be in your plan.
Throwing Everything Away
Decluttering is a substantial part of spring cleaning. All that junk you’ve accumulated over the winter needs to go somewhere. Before you give up and simply throw it all in the trash, consider the more reasonable alternatives. If you can recycle something rather than throwing it away, do your best to do so. If some things are donatable, consider giving them to an organization like the Purple Heart Pickup that will put those items to better use.
Reorganizing Rather Than Cleaning
Don’t fall into this trap unless your home is already devoid of clutter. There’s a distinctive difference between cleaning and decluttering effectively and just moving things into different places. Moving clutter from one area to another doesn’t make it clean, even if it does kind of feel like it. Be sure to get rid of things you no longer need, and you’ll have a much cleaner house by the end of the day.
Leaving Hard-To-Reach Places for the End
There’s nothing worse than going through all the work of cleaning an area and then forgetting you didn’t dust the ceiling fan beforehand. Areas such as crawl spaces, corners, and crevices are rife with dust and allergens. These should be where you start your cleaning, not where you end it. Leaving these until the end will only elongate the process.
