A big thank you to Eschelle from Mumfection for this post on Spring Cleaning! I love the way she has color coded her home to make this project as easy as possible!
This Spring, for our house, is going to be intense. I can’t say it will be an easy one, but this year our house is going to be SPOTLESS and completely organized even if it kills me. Spring cleaning is a big job and this year is even more so with the fact that my eldest will be entering Kindergarten in September and I want to be as organized as possible for that. I have a number of ideas on how I am going to attack everything I will share the rough draft of my plan with you here:
Closets/Storage for Donations (ORANGE) — I find this to be one of the most important steps cause it is the time where you not only clean out and uncluttered, you are given the privileged of teach your children a life lesson on giving to others in need. When it comes to closets I like to work from the back of the house to the front, which for me, means I start with the children’s closets/drawers. Making sure to go through all their toys WITH the kids, and their clothes. Thankfully for me this year it almost means putting all my eldest clothes right into my youngest dressers, then it is just a matter of going through my saved up hand-me-downs to fill up my eldests’ dressers the best I can. At that time I know exactly what my eldest will be in need of and I can go out and BUY WISELY. Which is really important on a budget like mine, if I am lucky this year I will be collecting a million hand-me-downs making purchasing clothes basically an obsolete budget requirement.
Kitchen & Bathrooms (RED) — I like to consider both the bathrooms to be in a completely different category from everything else. That of which I like to break up my bedroom cleanings with… mainly cause I procrastinate when it comes to folding clothing in my own room…. I hate it. One thing all mother’s need is a machine that folds your clothes for you, that is CHEAP! So I again like to start from the back emptying the bathroom just as if we were moving, throwing out expired products or empty bottles etc… After that I wipe everything down, praying to remove the boy smell from the bathroom (I have a trick for that), then re-organizing as I am putting everything back into place. From that point I end up in the kitchen working top to bottom, again taking everything out just as I did with the bathroom. [my trick for eliminating boy smell].
**note not actually MY trick… my ADOPTED trick so to say lol!!!
currently messy toy storage
Organization (MAGENTA) — This is the tedious part, going back through everything and putting it away properly (minus the bathroom and kitchen which you have already finished). It begins with my most hated tasks, laundry and folding which then leads into organizing of all the clothes, which you have partially done already so this isn’t the hard part. Once your dressers are all full and the laundry is gone, remembering to take time to adjust your linen closet as you put things away, you can move to the toys. This I find so hard, re-separating everything and washing them. This washing step is over looked by a lot of people but as a daycare provider I have to do this bi-weekly anyways, more often if a sickness breaks out. We have bins for our boys and they are always messy!! I know that is attributed to the fact that during the weekdays I have four boys in my house. The last part of this stage is going to be my biggest task… dealing with knick-knacks. I have so many of these and no ways to display them, so my hope for this year is to find ways to showcase them, meaning shelves… I will need shelves, and pinterest is giving me more than enough ideas on how to do that; just a matter of getting hubby to execute my ideas!
Scrubbing etc… (BLUE) — This should be very self explanatory basically scrubbing EVERYTHING from ceilings to floors. Moving furniture around, the whole nine yards. When it comes to scrubbing I am not terribly keen on any particular brands for it. I have a few that I am loyal to like S.O.S pads for the dishes and BBQ grills, Comet for my bathtubs and I always use a vinegar water mix for my windows if I have nothing on hand that is an “all purpose” cleaner. When it comes to buying one of those I just use whatever is on sale or whatever I have a coupon for, if I am lucky they go together and it is twice as cheap! When it comes to the scrubbing stage it honestly comes down to pure elbow grease, cause you need to get down on your hands and knees all Cinderella style to do a really good job. My place is really old too so even when I do, do this it still looks messy, it drives me nuts but we make the best of it and I am hoping to get everything slowly fixed up to the point where I can overlook the rest. You know until we find a better apartment, a three bedroom apartment.
Computer (GREEN) — This one I bet no one really thinks of but it is really important to maintain your computer and that means turning it off for a moment and cleaning it out. I find that pressurized air in a can to be really helpful for some of the tougher parts of this job, but for the most part you can do it the old fashioned way. Once you have done all that it is important to go through and organize your files properly and clean out old downloads etc… that you no longer need. This is all stuff the gums up your computers gears so to speak. Once you have done that back everything up, you MUST do this, I would be crushed if I lost anything, so I have it saved in many different places to make sure that doesn’t happen. Then when all that horrible eye bleeding work is done you can DE-fragment or, what I like to do, reformat. Keeping your computer clean and free of any unnecessary junk to make it slow and unhappy.
When I finally get to the end of all that computer work I will be really happy cause I will have accomplished all this work and felt sooo great about it! In fact just to get everything straight for you I have drawn out a basic map of my house and color coded it to this order. Now you can see exactly what my “map of attack” is as they say. I hope it makes sense to you cause it was surprisingly hard to try and map it all out, even though my layout is rather small and simple compared to others. Also don’t think that my family gets out of any of this work, for example the computer is all on my hubby lol.
spring cleaning map (code is in the above description)
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