Spring cleaning tips and things you may be missing...

As self-isolation and social distancing stretches on, you may find yourself a bit bored just staying at home. Since there’s a big difference between choosing to stay at home and having to stay at home, even those who enjoy spending time at home may be struggling. This is why many people are starting to look for things that need to be done around the house – if you’re going to be stuck at home every day, you might as well be productive.

Fortunately, there are a number of spring-cleaning tasks that can keep you busy for a while. Don’t just dust, vacuum and call it a day, though. Consider tackling the following jobs as well to reduce your future maintenance needs and ensure that you’re ready to face the summer.

Clean the Windows (And the Screens)

Cleaning the windows is a classic spring-cleaning task, but it’s one of those tasks that’s all too easy to only do halfway. When you clean your windows, be sure to clean both the inside and the outside with a quality glass cleaner. You should also remove the window screens and clean them as well, especially if any of them have dirt or other icky stuff stuck in them after the winter.

Pressure Washing

Dirt, mold, mildew and moss can all degrade the materials of your home over time. That’s why it’s a good idea to break out the pressure washer and give your home a good ol’ scrubdown at least once a year. Spring is a good time to do this since it’s usually still a bit too cool for things that grow on your house to get out of hand. While you’ve got the pressure washer out, you should also look to see if there’s anything else around the house that could use a good deep clean. Check out picnic tables, fences and any other spots where dirt and other contaminants might accumulate.

Gutter Cleaning

A lot of people view gutter cleaning as a fall task, associating full gutters with fallen leaves. There are a lot of things that can clog up your gutters, though, including debris that gets washed off your roof by spring rain and melting snow. To reduce wear and tear on your gutters and make cleaning them easier overall, make cleaning your gutters into a task that you do at least twice a year, in the spring and fall.

Check Out the AC

As things start to warm up, a lot of people prefer to open their windows instead of cranking the air conditioning. You should at least give it a test run to make sure that it’s working properly, though. Clean your AC as best as you can, let it run for a while to make sure that it’s able to maintain the air temperature, and change any filters that need to be changed. If there’s a problem, it’s better to find out now and fix it than discover it in a few months when temperatures peak.

Don’t Forget the Furniture

A lot of dusting goes on in the spring, but it’s easy to forget that dust and dirt accumulate on furniture too. Break out the vacuum or a steam cleaner to give your furniture a good cleaning as a part of your spring-cleaning routine. Not only will this keep your furniture looking good and in good shape for longer, but it can also reduce allergies and other health issues within your home.

Test Those Smoke Detectors

It’s easy to forget smoke detectors if they aren’t beeping randomly in the middle of the night because they have a low battery. To keep your home safe, though, you should test your smoke detectors and replace their batteries every six months. Spring cleaning time is a great time to do this (and then do it again in the fall when you start preparing your home for winter). Don’t settle for just replacing batteries, either; if a smoke detector doesn’t work or seems to have a larger problem than just dead batteries, replace the entire unit.

How to keep kitchen appliances clean...

When the next bowl of chili explodes all over the inside of the microwave or you finally give in to the inch thick layer of pizza burn off inside your oven, this page of advice for cleaning household appliances will be right here waiting for you.

Common Appliances and How to Clean Them

For some people, cleaning is as natural as walking and breathing. But for the rest of us, it takes effort and probably some knowledge that we’re currently lacking. After all, it’s not such a big deal to clean a microwave, but for some reason it feels like it takes forever. Without further ado, here’s how to clean basically everything useful in your kitchen.

Microwave

Pre-prep Work: Put a coffee mug or small bowl full of water and slices of lemon in the center and run the microwave on high for about three minutes, or until the liquid is turning to steam. This will help soften food splatter and the lemon smells nice. You can also use other citrus fruits or forego it entirely and use a drop of dish soap.

Break It Down: Take out the turntable and anything else that will come loose. Toss these parts in the dishwasher and run it. Or wait if you have other stuff to stick in there and make it a full load.

The Nitty Gritty: Wipe down the walls of the microwave with a sponge, cloth or several paper towels, plus your favorite dish soap and water or all purpose cleaner. There’s not really a wrong way to clean a microwave. Wipe the outside while you’re at it, especially the buttons.

Garbage Disposal

Pre-prep Work: Unless you have a clog, there’s not much in the way of prep work to do. Flick the switch, run some cold water to make sure there’s not any food left in the device.

Break It Down: Some garbage disposals, like Insinkerators, have removable baffles (the black part that’s just inside the drain). If yours is removable, take it out. If not, then move along.

The Nitty Gritty: Cleaning a garbage disposal is really easy. Just clean your removable baffle, if present, and toss some citrus fruit inside. Most garbage disposals no longer use blades (don’t stick your hand in to find out unless the breaker is turned off), so the ice cube trick does nothing, but citrus is still a big deal. If it’s really smelly, drop some liquid dish soap inside and run the water until the bubbles stop.

Dishwasher

Pre-prep Work: Running an empty load with a measuring cup full of vinegar or bleach can help start the process off right. These chemicals help eliminate chronic smells, you’ll be really happy you did. DO NOT USE DISH SOAP.

Break It Down: Remove the racks and anything else that comes loose, like cutlery baskets. Take those to the shower and wait for further instructions.

The Nitty Gritty: First clean any screens that might be protecting food grinders or other moving parts. You can just wipe that out. Next, there’s such a thing as dishwasher cleaner. Your life will be immeasurably easier if you just buy a few of these and use as directed to clean the inside of the dishwasher.

Last, go find those racks you put in the shower. Spray them down with a removable shower head or take your chances with the regular kind. If they’re very dirty, give them a going over with soapy water and a sponge. Go slide those bad boys back into the machine. Wipe the outside.

Refrigerator

Pre-prep Work: Put food into a prepared cooler and turn the ice maker off.

Break It Down: Pull out all the shelves and drawers at once and place them in or near the sink.

The Nitty Gritty: Start with the empty fridge cavity and wipe everything down, from the top to the bottom. Warm, soapy water is fine for most residue, tough grime can be knocked out with all-surface cleaner. Next, do the door interiors.

Now wash the shelves and drawers and leave them to dry. Once all of that is complete, put the fridge back together and repeat with the freezer. Change your water filter and turn the ice maker back on when you’re done. Wipe the fridge outside down last.

Freestanding Range (this also applies to cooktops and ovens that exist independently)

Pre-prep Work: Smooth top ranges just need their tops wiped down. Turn the pilot lights off on gas ranges.

Break It Down: Pull knobs, remove grates, pull coils and catch pans, as applies to your stove.

The Nitty Gritty: If you have a stove with a self-cleaning oven, find your manual and figure out how to use it. Most will lock themselves, heat until they’re super hot and you only have to wipe the racks down and get the ash (there’s never much) out of the bottom. This will take a few hours. Maybe several hours. But it’ll be super clean.

For the top, wipe the bit that’s not removable down with soapy water. Grab the coils and set them aside and put the rest in the dishwasher. No reason to work too hard. Glass top stoves sometimes need harder cleaning. There’s a gritty glass top stove cleaner available commercially.

Put it all back together like you found it. Good work!

You Could Clean Your Own Appliances, Or….

You could find a great cleaning service in your HomeKeepr community. Just log on, ask your real estate agent for a recommendation and choose from the home pros that are sent your way. You’ll never have to worry about cleaning appliances again when you have a cleaning service handy. Recommendations are better than reviews, come and see the difference!

Spring cleaning tips

It’s officially spring again, everybody and their great aunt Erma are abuzz with cleaning and organizing advice. We’re not sheep at HomeKeepr, but we figured it was important to throw our voice into the ether, just in case you needed a different perspective. After all, we’re a little less Good Housekeeping and a little more Family Handyman.

The Three Vital Goals of a Spring Cleaning

Before we get into the tips, it’s a good idea to set some goals for your spring cleaning. A lot of people get into trouble because they fail to actually establish what it is that they hope to accomplish with their cleaning efforts. They aren’t going to be able to clean their home top to bottom over the course of the next month, contrary to the claims of some magazine (no, not the Weekly World News).

What ends up happening is that one room gets really clean, the next one is pretty clean, and diminishing returns follow until they give up and take a nap. Establishing goals gives you a way to know you’ve achieved something and those goals can tell you pretty precisely how much further you have to go.

Your vital goals may be slightly different, but odds are that these are in the ballpark:

Increase the feeling of openness in your home.
Make it easier to find things that disappeared last year.
Declutter. All. The. Things.
Before we proceed with these three goals, please understand that nothing in this article is meant as a judgement on you or anyone else. Everybody has their challenges and blind spots. Maybe you’re not very good at organizing, but you’re great at chess. We can’t all be great chess players.

Attacking Your Vital Spring Cleaning Goals

Whether you’re going to sort of just jump in the middle of your goals and attack them from all angles or you want a more organized approach, you need a plan of action that works for you. Don’t even start without one. If you have something working well for you, go with it, but if not, we’ve got a short attack plan for each goal above down below.

Keep in mind that some of these lists can be done simultaneously if you really want to be efficient. If not, that’s ok, too. This is your spring cleaning. Own it.

Goal: Increasing the Feeling of Openness In Your Home

Increasing the feeling of openness in your home comes down to one thing: light. The more light in your home, the bigger and more open it feels. Achieving this seemingly impossible goal is actually really easy and you can do it without replacing a single window or tearing down walls. See, it’s all about that glass. It’s about the paint on your walls, too, but for the amended spring cleaning, focus on the glass. That includes:

Windows. Scrub these things like they’ve never been washed. They probably haven’t. Wash the insides and then go outside and wash the outside. Just washing the windows will brighten up your space enough that you may end up stopping at this point.
Mirrors. Those mirrors are bouncing light around the room. Just because your windows are letting more light in doesn’t mean that it’s going to survive long once it hits that dirty mirror. Clean, clean away.
Light fixtures. By light fixtures, we mean those light kits on your ceiling fan, the bulb enclosures on chandeliers and the shades on ceiling huggers. Anything glass, take it down and clean it. Most of these items can go into the dishwasher, but put anything thin or fragile in the top rack.
Light bulbs. Oh, the lowly lightbulb. How we forget you all the time when doing almost anything. You’re just a magic tube that gives us light… unfortunately, bulbs also get dirty, so grab your Swiffer duster and give all your bulbs a good once-over.
Goal: Make It Easier to Find Things

This one has a single, simple solution: The Container Store. Or any other sort of place where you can get every kind of organizer you could dream up. The reason homes get cluttered too often is because there’s simply not any kind of proper storage to begin with. Of course you’re going to struggle to find things when those things don’t have a permanent home!

You really don’t even need a list here. It’s all in the organization. Go room by room and take stock of what lays out a lot of the day. Do the kids throw their coats on the couch and wander off? Coat rack by the door should fix that. Does your closet look like it exploded? Check out some of the super impressive closet systems they make these days.

Sure, it’s going to take a little bit of an investment to make this goal manageable, but ultimately you’ll find that it’s worth it when you don’t end up buying three of the same top because you couldn’t find the one you needed the day you were going to give that big presentation.

Goal: Declutter

You can and should probably work on this while you’re working on organizing stuff. Decluttering has become a meme, you know what it’s all about. You take all the stuff that you own and then you subject it to your hardest judgement. Will you use that spork set again? Is that pair of duck shoes really necessary in the desert? So many questions and decisions to make.

Getting stuck trying to decide what gets to go? Ask these questions:

Am I using it regularly?
When I am using it, do I enjoy using it?
Have I effectively replaced this item and simply keep it around for nostalgia?
Am I really going to “fit back into these jeans?” Be honest. Cake is delicious.
Do I really want to finish this project?
Do I have too many of this item? (belts, shoes, microwave bacon cookers)
Am I keeping this item out of some sense of guilt? (gifts, mainly)
Once you’ve done this, grab the boxes and bags. Sort the items you don’t need into “useable and worth donating” and “garbage, only good for trashing.” If any of the trash is recyclable, you know, a third recycle bin is probably warranted

Achieve Your Spring Cleaning Goals This Year or Go Down Fighting!

With defined goals and plans in place to tackle each one, spring cleaning should be so much easier this year than it was in the past. Doing some regular cleaning might not be a bad idea, either, but you can always leave the basic stuff like doing the floors and washing the walls to home pros from your HomeKeepr network. People who make it their business to clean and organize your stuff are among the elite ranks of home pros that belong to the community. Just ask your real estate agent for a recommendation and you’ll be well on your way..

Get Your Workout While Spring Cleaning