Monday Motivation #52 | Spring Cleaning Motivation: Historical, Modern & Biblical

Spring cleaning can feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to tackle it without purpose or perspective. In this episode, I'm sharing historical, modern, and Biblical encouragement to help you approach seasonal cleaning as a manageable reset—one step at a time.

Join me every Monday this spring for more seasonal cleaning motivation and practical help. We are tackling tools next week, followed by episodes featuring different surfaces of the home working our way from the top, down. 

SHOW NOTES:

sources

Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (New York, 1850), pp. 43-44.

https://www.wealddown.co.uk/museum-news/victorian-deep-clean/

Modern Cleaning Motivation

YouTube

• hamimommy
• Scandish Home
• Clean My Space

Analog

• Homekeeping Handbook | Martha Stewart
• Home Comforts | Cheryl Mendelson

Biblical History of Spring Cleaning

Exodus 11-12

Transcript

Why Spring Cleaning is Overwhelming

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Happy Monday, homemakers! Welcome to Monday Motivation, brought to you by the Art of Home Podcast, where we are exploring how homemakers cultivate a place to belong. I'm your host, Alison Weeks. I'm a wife, a mom, a granny, and I've been practicing the Art of Home for over 30 years. Thank you so much for joining me for a little Monday motivation today. Every Monday, you can meet me here for homemaking tips, ideas, and encouragement in this short form episode. If you like what you hear today, be sure to check out our long form episodes that come out every Wednesday, where we feature stories of homemakers just like you and deep dives into topics related to homemaking. Many an ambitious homemaker has resolved to master the practice of spring cleaning, only to find herself overwhelmed and depleted of all motivation within half a day of work. She starts with the very best intentions and the highest energy, tackling clutter and cobwebs, but without proper planning and purpose, she quickly feels buried under the weight of her task. Other homemakers are so paralyzed by the enormity of it all, they never even begin. They're already drowning in the day-to-day homemaking. How on earth could they find time for spring cleaning? Whether you find yourself in the former or the latter group, I want to provide you with some historical, modern, and spiritual spring cleaning motivation today. Looking back at the history of spring cleaning will give us some perspective on the tasks and the tools of modern homemakers compared to those of past generations of women. Looking around at modern homemaking wisdom and resources will inspire and inform our spring cleaning goals. And turning our eyes to the origins of spring cleaning will remind us that all of life, including housework, is gospel saturated if we only have eyes to see. Spring cleaning a historical perspective. Second only as regards discomfort to the troubles of moving. Scarce an object about a house seems in its proper place, topsy turvy is the order of the day. Curtains and carpets are seen hanging out of doors, windows are sashless, beds are found in passages, chairs are upside down, the ceiling is in possession of the whitewash brush, and the mop has the floor. As reporters say of the honorable MCs. Meanwhile, the cleaners, relentless as furies, pursue the family from room to room until the last stronghold is invaded, and the very cats and dogs look wretched. It must be confessed, however, that after the great turmoil is over, when the week or fortnight or three weeks of scrubbing, scouring, drenching are past, there is a moment of delightful repose in a family. There is a refreshing consciousness that all is sweet and clean from garret to cellar. There is a purity in the neighborhood, the same order and clean freshness meet you as you cross every threshold. This is very pleasant, but it is a pity that it should be purchased at the cost of so much previous confusion, so many petty annoyances. Susan Finimore Cooper Aurural Hours eighteen fifty. These words pinned over one hundred and seventy five years ago describe spring cleaning chaos taking over a typical nineteenth century American village for days or even weeks. Every home, large and small, would be turned upside down and inside out each spring to wash away all traces of winter, namely soot, grime, pests, and germs. No surface escaped untouched. From top to bottom, our four mothers scrubbed, swept, and polished their homes to wipe the slate clean and prepare for the coming warmer months. All winter long, the home's walls and the surfaces collected soot and ashes from wood or coal burning fires, while the windows, if there were any, stayed tightly shut to keep the cold outside and the heat and the dirt inside. With the arrival of spring, homemakers could throw open their doors and windows to the welcome sunshine and warm air. They would remove all of the furniture, rugs, linens, and tapestries from the home to give every item a thorough cleaning and airing in the sanitizing rays of the sun. Then they would tackle the empty interior of the home, scrubbing every surface, ceiling to floor, to rid the house of all dirt, bugs, vermin, and germs. Rising temperatures would promote the growth of bacteria, so it was imperative for health and safety to thoroughly clean the home before the onset of the summer heat. Not only was the historical homemaker tasked with cleaning the home and all its contents, she usually had to make her own cleaning supplies. Soap has been used for cleaning bodies, linens, and homes for thousands of years, but it was not produced commercially until the early 1800s. Most households had to make their own soap through a multi-day, labor-intensive process of boiling wood ash and mixing the resulting lye with rendered animal fat. Consider that the next time you click add to cart for your favorite bar of soap. Then there was the matter of water. Indoor plumbing was not common before 1900 in most homes. Women had to tote their water from a pump, well, or nearby stream. Imagine having to fetch and carry every bit of water you would need to clean your home and all of its contents. Then, of course, if she wanted to clean with hot water, the homemaker would have to build a fire and heat the water herself. For tough set-in stains and grime on cloth and carpets, homemade soap often was not strong enough, and homemakers instead turned to the cleaning power of naturally occurring ammonia in stale urine. Yes, you heard me right. They would clean with pea. And not fresh pea, pea that had been sitting around for a while to increase its potency. Doesn't that sound delightful? And this was before rubber gloves. Dear homemaker, I don't share all of this historical homemaking gory detail to shame you into housework. I tell you this as a gentle reminder not to romanticize the past nor despise the present. Yes, modern homemaking has legitimate challenges, but praise God that the backbreaking labor of historical spring cleaning is for the most part not one of those challenges. Spring cleaning for the modern homemaker. In the late 1800s, the Industrial Revolution transformed the work of the homemaker. No longer was she tasked with everything from making the supplies to moving the carpets. Inventions and advancements in technology, industry, and medicine brought help for the harried housewife. An annual spring clean continued to be a standard practice for most households throughout the first half of the 20th century. But after World War II, it became less and less necessary. The home of the future was comfortably equipped with clean, central heat and air, time-saving electric appliances, and powerful chemical cleaning products. This allowed the homemaker to keep a tidy, sanitary home all year round with much less effort. While we no longer need to purge and clean the whole house for health and safety, spring cleaning can serve as a seasonal reset for the modern homemaker and her home. When she practices a regular system of basic cleaning and organization throughout the year, spring cleaning becomes less of a top-to-bottom purge and more of an opportunity to tackle the infrequent and the forgotten tasks. Washing windows and window coverings, deep cleaning appliances, cleaning vents, chimneys and air returns, shampooing carpets and scrubbing tile grout are a few of the tasks that I would classify as spring or seasonal cleaning. They don't need to be done weekly or even monthly, but they should not be completely ignored, because that would lead to the surface, the appliance, or the system wearing out before it's time, costing you expensive repairs or even replacement. Modern advice for spring cleaning can be found in every corner of the internet. Some is good, some is terrible. Clean talk, YouTube, Reddit, and blogs by the millions will give you ideas for carrying out your seasonal cleaning tasks. When I'm not feeling inspired to clean, I love to cue up a cleaning video on YouTube during my lunch break, which often motivates me to tackle a project right away. I prefer longer YouTube videos over short form because they tend to provide more detailed information and are much less likely to suck me into an unproductive doom scroll. Some of my personal favorites on YouTube are South Korean housewife Hami Mommy for aesthetically pleasing homemaking videos with a major emphasis on clean, organized spaces. There's a lot of very similar YouTube accounts out there as well. Naomi over at Scandish Home offers a lot of natural cleaning advice. And then for the down and dirty practical cleaning wisdom, check out Melissa Maker at Clean My Space. I will link all of those in the show notes. For analog spring cleaning help and inspiration, look no further than the queen of modern homemaking, Martha Stewart. Her books, magazines, and articles contain a treasure trove of cleaning schedules and hints and detailed how-to's on everything that you would ever want to clean in your house. Her homekeeping handbook, the essential guide to caring for everything in your home, should be on every modern homemaker's shelf. Check your local library or used bookstore for any of Martha's books on home cleaning, organization, and management. As with any project, having a plan and knowing your purpose will see you through to the end of your spring cleaning when motivation and energy are running low. I recommend printing out a basic seasonal cleaning checklist from a trusted internet source like Martha Stewart, The Nest, or Better Homes and Gardens, and walking through your home room by room to determine which of those tasks apply to your home and circumstances and which do not. Then make a plan for when and how you will tackle the seasonal projects that made the cut. Remember, spring cleaning is a marathon, not a sprint. Do not try to tackle the whole list in one day or even one week. I like to spread the tasks out over the entire season, giving myself little rewards along the way for each milestone I reach. Origins of Spring Cleaning Spiritual Motivation. Viewing spring cleaning through the lens of homemaking past helps to shift our perspective and increase our gratitude, but viewing it through the lens of Scripture will change our purpose and empower our efforts. One of the earliest known examples of spring cleaning is found in the book of Exodus. In chapters 11 and 12, we see that the Israelites have been slaves in Egypt for 400 years, and God is about to deliver them. He has sent nine plagues to warn Pharaoh to let his people go, but Pharaoh has not cooperated. God is about to send the final plague that will bring death to all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. Firstborn livestock, nobles, beggars, Egyptians, and Jews alike, no one will escape the angel of death. But God in his mercy provides a way out of this death. He instructs his people to slaughter a perfect lamb, roast and eat the lamb, and apply its blood to the doorframe of their home. When the angel of death comes that night to the land of Egypt and sees the blood of the lamb on the door, he will pass over that house, and everyone inside of that home, including the firstborn humans and animals, will be saved from death. God also instructs his people that from that day forward they are to commemorate this Passover by reenacting it every year at the appointed time. The seven days leading up to the Passover celebration would be called the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The Israelites are to not only eat unleavened bread for seven days, but they are to carefully search their homes for any trace of leaven or yeast, and remove it. As Passover always falls in the spring, scholars believe this Jewish tradition of a leaven search is the origin of spring cleaning. Leaven or yeast is a symbol for sin in the Bible. Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God, sacrificed himself so that death would pass over those of us who find our protection under the covering of his blood. For the Jews, removing the leaven from their homes and their bread before Passover was a physical reminder of a spiritual reality. Salvation from death comes to those who humbly allow God to purge the pride and sin from their hearts and cover them with the blood of the Lamb. As spring cleaning is a deep cleanse of one's home, so salvation and sanctification, or growing in Christ, is a deep cleanse of one's soul. For many cultures, spring cleaning symbolizes the shift from winter's death to the new life of spring. For the believer, Christ's soul cleansing sacrifice ushers us from spiritual death to new eternal life. When we practice spring cleaning, or any cleaning for that matter, we can view our work as a picture of the cleansing, protecting, preserving, life-giving work of the Lamb of God in us. That's all for this Monday motivation. I hope you've been encouraged and inspired to let historical spring cleaning, modern spring cleaning, and biblical spring cleaning motivate your own practice of going the extra seasonal mile in homemaking this spring. This episode kicks off a season-long series on spring cleaning. Next week, we will explore the tools and supplies and then week by week work our way through the house with the top-down cleaning approach. First, we will talk about ceilings, vents, and other spaces above our head, and then we will move on to the walls and the windows, then appliances, furniture, and the forgotten, and finally, we will cover floors, carpets, and baseboards. I hope you will join me each Monday and gain the motivation you need to tackle your seasonal cleaning one step at a time. Remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Until next time, keep practicing your art of making a home.