Spring Cleaning: One Room at a Time

At my house, spring cleaning is a bit of a misnomer.  Basically, by the time spring hits, I'm going to be busier with outside projects than wanting to spend my Saturdays indoors cleaning house.  So starting in January, we choose a room each Saturday to clean - and by we I mean myself and my kids (against their will).  Occasionally we miss a week due to extenuating scheduling circumstances, but generally the goal is to be finished with the house by the end of March.  Each room takes 2-5 hours to clean (and that sure beats 35 hours of straight cleaning).  This makes each Saturday's job doable - challenging - but doable.  Hopefully, my kids will at least not only know what to deep clean, but have the practiced skills to do so once they leave the nest.  

We start at the top of the house and work our way down room by room:

1. Kid bedroom
2. Kid bedroom
3. Kid bathroom
4. Upstairs hallway & linen closet
5. Living room & entry
6. Kitchen (top of soffets & outside of cabinets)
7. Kitchen (inside of cabinets)
8. Dining room/area
9. Family room
10. Laundry room & guest bath
11. optional areas: unfinished basement & garage

You'll notice that the master bedroom, closet and bath are not listed since those areas I clean on my own instead of as a family. Also, We do all the windows and blinds on another Saturday and clean the carpets once we're done spring cleaning. 

Here are some of ways we clean each room:

• empty, dejunk, clean & replace all items in all drawers, closets and cabinets
• wipe down all furniture
• wipe down all walls (only using a damp rag so as not to affect the paint)
• wipe down all trim (baseboards, doors and door jambs)
• vacuum underneath furniture and inside all couches, chairs etc.  
• clean all light fixtures
• polish all wood 
• wipe out all window sills
• scrub all tile and grout with serious elbow grease
• clean all vents and cold air returns
• remove, clean and replace all pictures (it's amazing how much dust collects on the back of a frame)
• polish all plants (live or artificial)
• wash out all wastebaskets

So as you might imagine, we collect a bunch of things to throw out or donate so our garbage can stays fairly full and we make a few donation trips.  

Every time I help someone move I always feel like there is a lot of benefit to the deep cleansing that comes from a move.  But as I'm not so insanely motivated to do a pseudo-move in order to achieve those results, I use spring cleaning as the next best thing.  So that at any given time, if I do have to move, I at least know that there is no more than at most, one year of hidden dust to deal with if I ever (heaven forbid) had to move.