The Extension Connection

Simple Solutions for Spring Cleaning

• Lindsey Edwards

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Hello everybody and welcome back to the Extension Connection Podcast where we connect our listeners to research-based resources to help them build better lives. Hey everyone. This is Lindsey Edwards, your family and consumer science extension agent in Polk County. And today, since we're coming into the spring season, I wanna go over the topic of spring cleaning. This may actually turn into a two or three part series on cleaning, decluttering, and home maintenance and things that should be done maybe quarterly, bi-annually or even yearly, to ensure that our homes are running in tiptop shape like they should be. But today I just wanna cover the topic of cleaning and what most people like to refer to as spring cleaning, because it's a time that we can basically jump back into. A little bit more intensive cleaning projects in our house. As our houses become a little bit more warm, we can open the windows, let in some fresh air, and focus on those little tedious tasks that we might not have done maybe in the winter or the fall. I know that sometimes a task of deep cleaning our homes can be a little overwhelming. At least it can for me and sometimes. It's hard, especially for me to kind of figure out where I need to start. What I'd like to do is help break this down into smaller steps to help you accomplish the tasks that you need to do in your home. The University of Kentucky has a great resource for how to break down cleaning, which I'll attach in the show notes. And I'm using the steps that they have listed in this podcast to basically, break down what you do when you clean your home. So step one is to make a list. I know this sounds crazy and maybe a little counterintuitive'cause you're not actually starting to clean, but writing down your plan of what you want to clean exactly inside your house is something that is extremely important to help you stay on task. It allows you to remember all the things you wanted to do, and it also can help you to create a plan that makes it more efficient. For example, like maybe you wanna do laundry, but you also want to deep clean your laundry room, or you want to deep clean your oven, or you wanna do a self clean oven. Those things like a self cleaning oven and doing laundry have a lot of downtime in them. When you create a list. You can use that downtime and utilize that time to do other tasks in its place. Maybe you turn on your self-cleaning oven that takes three hours, and during that time you have three hours or the time that you're doing that task, or maybe in between your laundry sessions you can be doing another task. Making out a plan is a great way. To ensure that you're getting everything that you want done and that you are not missing anything. I tend to go from task to task to task, and I have a hard time completing things. Making a list is very important for me because if I forget what I'm doing and go on to something different, that list makes me go back to the original thing I was doing. Alright, step two. Gather all necessary supplies. I do have a caddy at my house of all the cleaning supplies that I bring into, my bathrooms, But I also get out any equipment like mops, brooms, vacuum cleaners. You have a carpet cleaner and are doing that in your deep cleaning session. That might be something you wanna take out at this time. Having all the equipment out. Before you start makes it easier for you to keep going where you don't have to stop. Figure out where you put the mop last time. Go find it. Fill it up, get everything out. Get your rags out, the different items for the different parts of your house. Put it in one centralized location where you know where everything is, and then you can move on to step three, which. Is the pickup step go through your house and before you actually start any of the cleaning with any of your sprays or anything like that, pick up your house. Clean off your countertops. Take everything off the ground, put things away. Make your house look neat and tidy. It may not be clean, like things may not be dusted, but it doesn't look like there's clutter everywhere. This is an essential step that you don't wanna miss because, things can become very distracting. We wanna put our things away so that when we do get to the actual cleaning, we don't have to worry about. Cleaning up as we go or tidying up as we go. This will not only save you time, it'll save your sanity in the long run. This can also lead into another type of cleaning altogether, decluttering. Decluttering it takes a lot of time. So it's its own category of cleaning. This is from Oklahoma State University. It's, I'm quoting them. It says, when clutter interferes with our daily life, develop a plan to get it under control. This is from Gina Peak, the assistant director of Oklahoma State University Family and Consumer Science Program. She says removing clutter can improve organization, reduce stress, and make a home more usable. Decluttering will increase mobility around the home, reclaim unusable space, and may even increase socialization because now there's room to have people visit. Removing clutter can help reduce the risk of falls and give the ability to move freely in the home, think in terms of a medical emergency and how hard it would be to get a stretcher in and out of your home. Those are some good tips, again from Oklahoma State University that we do wanna try to maintain a clutter-free home. Alright, step four, start your cleaning. So notice it's taken up to step four for us to actually start this spring cleaning that we're talking about. That's a lot of prep before we actually start cleaning our house. But all of those are very important and try not to skip them. With spring cleaning, you're thinking about things that you might not normally be doing on a weekly basis in your cleaning routine. Things like dusting your baseboards, or cleaning the fronts of your cabinet fronts. Cleaning any kind of window treatments, maybe taking them down and putting them through the washing machine if they are. Able to go into the washing machine, cleaning your carpets. I like to prioritize the things that I'm not normally worried about. Maybe I don't have time to do them, or it's just not something that's on my radar all year round. So give your house that deep clean. Now, I do wanna remind you or give you some areas of your house that. I think should be prioritized at least once a year. And sometimes again, we have a hard time reminding ourselves to clean these areas. And maybe you don't. But some of these are the things that, again, I'm reminding myself to clean my house. Start in your kitchen. Things like cleaning out drawers and cabinets, taking everything out, giving them a good vacuum, wiping them down, cleaning the fronts of the cabinet doors, cleaning and sanitizing your sink really well. I suggest you do this very regularly and not once a year. I like to scrub mine. Really well with soap. Clean it first and then I sanitize. I use a bleach solution. And I also. I'll let that sit and then I'll drain it. I fill the whole sink up, let it sit, and then I'll drain it so that I'm sanitizing my sinks cleaning your oven. If you don't have a self-cleaning oven setting, then that means you're scrubbing your oven, the door, the bottom, getting any buildup that might be at the bottom of your oven that could burn. And then if you're even brave enough, maybe pulling your oven out and vacuuming and cleaning on the sides and behind it. I know a lot of crumbs tend to fall into mine, like the side in between the cabinet and where my oven is. So that's a great thing to do once a year. Your microwave, again, this is probably something you should be doing more than once a year, but a good way to clean your microwave. If you put a cup of water with a few tablespoons of vinegar in it and microwave that for 30 seconds to a minute, and then take it out and wipe everything down. If you have a removable plate, take that out, clean it. Give your microwave a good clean. One thing I have to remind myself to do at least once a year, which probably should be done more, is my coffee maker, descaling, and cleaning out the machine is very important to keep everything working properly, especially if you have, well, water that has a lot of minerals in it, it can scale up and cause your machine to stop working so descale and clean that coffee maker. Refrigerator, again, something you should be doing probably at least quarterly, but taking everything out of your refrigerator, drawers and shelves, and cleaning down everything. The walls. Get those appliances as clean as possible. Clean them. The, plastic, or I guess they're rubber gaskets around the doors where it connects the door to the actual refrigerator. Make sure those are cleaned out and then wipe around everything. Same thing with your dishwasher. Dishwashers can get dirty and they usually have a filter at the bottom of them, so taking that out and scrubbing it if it's removable, making sure there's no food and that everything is cleaned around the sides. The gaskets. I'm sure there's more that you can think of in your kitchens. Everyone's kitchen is different, but just giving your kitchen that really good, deep clean that it needs. Then moving on to the bathroom, other than the regular tasks like our tub, shower, toilet sinks, countertops. Taking any rugs that you have or, any cloth, like if you do have window treatments or anything like that, and giving it a good wash and hot water in your washing machine if you have a shower curtain, replacing the plastic liner, cleaning the faucet heads. We've removed our faucet heads before and cleaned them out. That's a really good idea. And that's of like the sinks, the showers, the tubs, and then obviously cleaning out the hair or any buildup in your drains in other rooms of the house. Working on hard to reach places, so things that you probably wouldn't normally clean because you can't get to them. So again, your baseboards, cleaning carpets, moving big furniture to vacuum and clean behind it. And then taking like cushions off of furniture, vacuuming, everything really well. Fans, ceiling fans are hard to reach. Areas that are high in your house trying to get up there and dust safely. And then another whole thing. Which we haven't even talked about,'cause we've only been talking about the inside of our house is cleaning the outside too. If you have living space on the outside of your house, like a patio or a porch, cleaning off those areas. Now, I'll tell you where we live. I like to wait till about May to do this because if you. Do a really good cleaning of your porch in March, you will have to do it again multiple times because of the amount of pollen that can get onto surfaces, even on a screened in porch. The pollen is very bad from about, i, I would say march to, to may. I usually do try to wait till about May to deep clean the outside of my house just because the polling covers everything, so just keep that in mind. But also don't forget to do those areas. I like to pressure wash, like porches, patios, even my patio furniture. I pressure wash. I have a, a not very strong electric pressure washer that I take out and do, but it just gets everything really clean and, and ready for us to use that summer. When you get into this cleaning process, I really recommend completing one area of your home at a time before you move on to the next to ensure that you complete all the tasks necessary. Like I told you, this is one of my biggest flaws because I'll go from thing to thing to thing, and I don't ever finish anything. So in order to make myself finish, I like to stay in one room, complete all the tasks before moving on to the next room. Another thing I wanna touch on just quickly before we end. Is the type of cleaning products that you're using. Please, please, please read the label and ensure that the product you are using can be used for the certain surface of your home. For example, if you're spraying something on your countertops and you have a specific type of countertop, it can ruin that countertop. Just make sure that the product you're using can be used on. The surface of your home. Also never mix any products certain products mixed together can create toxic gases. Keep that in mind. Don't mix things. And then another safety precaution is that if you are removing. One product out of a bottle and moving it to another. Always label the bottles so that you know what that product is and that you ensure that you're using that product correctly. Really, the best thing is to keep the products in their original containers, so you have all those labels on them that tell you how to use them, but if for some reason you are using a refillable water bottle or refillable spray bottle, make sure that you are labeling it. There are really so many other things that I could go over in this podcast, but just to make sure that we don't go on and on and on, and so that you can really individualize this depending on your home. This is where we're gonna stop and just. Let you focus on the things that you need to do in your home. This is just a reminder of some that may be helpful to you. I do hope that you found this helpful, and if you have any questions about cleaning or anything else, family and consumer science related, please feel free to contact me at the extension office. I will leave a few resources in the show notes for the. Information on cleaning your home, and I will talk to you next month as we deep dive even deeper into home maintenance. Thank you for listening to the Extension Connection, and I look forward to talking to.