Spring cleaning and decluttering tips to help you lighten up your home:

Spring is just around the corner, and it is the perfect time to lighten up for a fresh start. Here are 13 tips to get you started spring cleaning and decluttering your home.

1. Break the job into small chunks.

If you have a large amount of spring cleaning and decluttering to do, don’t try and take on the whole house at one time. This will not only be overwhelming, but it will be less rewarding at the end of the day because it harder to see your progress.  Instead, focus on one small area at a time. 

Move on to another area only after you have completed the first.  At the end of the day, you will reap the rewards of your labor every time you open your pantry door and see a clean and decluttered space. 

2. If you are planning on taking on a large spring cleaning and decluttering project, do it in this order.

Do all of your decluttering first, then move on to cleaning your house as a finishing touch.  If you have a whole house to declutter, avoid starting with a challenging category of clutter.  Generally, keepsakes, photos, and paperwork are all more difficult to tackle.  It takes much longer to go through paper and photos than it takes to declutter your pantry.  Also, keepsakes and photos usually have so many emotions tied to them, that decision-making is more difficult.

To make more rapid progress, choose a smaller more manageable space like your bathroom, kitchen pantry, or hall closet. Typically, it is much easier to make decisions about nearly empty bottles of shampoo and expired food than your keepsakes.

3. Avoid the “shuffling” trap.

Be careful not to make the mistake of moving items from room to room instead of deciding what to do with it all. If you do this, you will never finish decluttering! This is a common decluttering mistake.

It is so easy to make this mistake because it is harder to make decisions about what to do with something than it is to just move it around. But if you are only postponing decisions, no real progress is being made.

If you decide to keep something, determine a permanent home for it. If you can’t find a place to store it because your storage spaces are already full, this may be a sign that you have too much stuff.  Your home has likely exceeded its clutter threshold.

Take the time to go through your closets and cabinets and do a deep cleanout. Creating some space in your home so that you can put items away, will usually put a stop to the shuffling game.

4. Determine if your house has exceeded its clutter threshold.

Once your home has exceeded its clutter threshold and its storage spaces are overfilled, items begin to accumulate in visual places and clutter and disorganization follow. Take a look at your home’s closets, drawers, and cabinets, if they are filled to the brim, it might be time to do a deep cleanout and declutter your storage spaces. Here are three signs your home has exceeded its clutter threshold:

1. Every time you open a closet, drawer, or cabinet door, things spill out. It’s a hassle to find things inside these storage spaces because too much stuff is crammed in there.

2. Every time you tidy up your home and get everything put away, it all seems to return in no time.

3. Multiple items never even get put away because you don’t have a place to put them. Instead, they sit out in the open, on floors and countertops making your home look and feel cluttered.

5. Establish a donation box for your family.

Keep a donation box in a designated location in your home year-round, this will allow you and your family to toss no longer used items in the box as they come across them.  This is a simple trick that will prevent unwanted items from getting shoved back into drawers or closets. If everyone in your family knows about the box, you will be surprised at how fast it fills up. The donation box becomes an automatic tool that helps you declutter your home. Then all you have to do is get the boxes in your car and drop them off at a charity.

6. Do not wait, donate.

If you have things you are holding onto because you want to have a garage sale or sell by another means, evaluate whether or not the money you will make selling these items is really worth the time and effort.  A garage sale takes a lot of time and planning.

By choosing to donate, you free up precious space, and you declutter your home immediately. Donating is the quickest way to get rid of the clutter and save yourself the headache of selling the items.  You also come away with knowing that you made a difference by helping those in need.

Move onto spring cleaning once decluttering is done:

7. Vinegar and baking soda are excellent natural cleaning products. 

Vinegar and baking soda will clean just about everything in your home and do a better job! Vinegar and baking soda are gentle, natural, more environmentally friendly, and less costly. I now use these two products on nearly everything in my home.

Baking soda is perfect for anything that needs a porous scrub like bathtubs, and kitchen sinks. White vinegar diluted with a little water in a spray bottle creates a powerful multi-surface cleaning product. I use 2 parts vinegar – 1 part water. This vinegar solution can be used on sinks, mirrors, cabinets, floors, showers, and much more. 

Since vinegar and water are gentle and effective on so many surfaces, you can buy less of all those other products and save more storage space.  

8. How to clean your microwave quickly.

Stop scrubbing your microwave all the time with two effective solutions: 1 – Keep a microwave splatter cover in your microwave at all times so your family will remember to use it. 2 – To clean it, spray it down with the above-mentioned vinegar solution and wait 5-10 minutes. It will instantly wipe clean with no scrubbing required.

9. Follow these steps to get hardwood floors sparkling clean.

You can use vinegar and water in a bucket, and a mop to safely clean your hardwood floors. Use half a cup of white vinegar and a gallon bucket of warm water. Use a mop that allows you to easily access nooks and crannies. I prefer to use a Rubbermaid self-wringing mop because it is durable, long-lasting, and cleans well.  

Make sure you don’t get your wood floors too wet, as water can remove the finish or potentially cause warping or deterioration. I avoid using disposable floor-mopping products. They may be quick, but they don’t do a good job, are costly, and they’re not environmentally friendly. 

10. Get your bathroom and kitchen sinks clean fast using this method.

Spray the entire sink and faucet with vinegar and water solution. Let it sit for a few minutes to loosen stains and hard water deposits. Use the porous side of a scratch-free sponge to scrub the sink and faucet. Rinse with water. Wipe the sink dry with a clean cotton cloth and revel at how sparkling clean it is! 

If your sink is extremely soiled, you can use a small amount of baking soda and the porous side of a scratch-free scrub sponge to scrub it clean before spraying it with vinegar and water. 

11. Keep all of your bathroom cleaning products together.   

Rather than storing several stinky bathroom cleaning products underneath every bathroom sink, keep everything in one handy bathroom cleaning caddy.  

Be sure to choose a bin with a handle so you can easily carry it when you clean. This bin should be large enough to hold everything you need for cleaning the bathrooms. This will allow you to reduce how many cleaning products you need to buy and store. 

12. To make progress faster, clean your house task by task, not room by room.

It takes less time to apply a task to your whole house than to clean one room at a time. For example, when you vacuum, vacuum the whole house. It takes too long to clean one room at a time.  

When I clean, I do it in this order: I pick up any trash or clutter, clean all bathrooms, clean the kitchen, then dust the whole house. Next, I sweep and vacuum everywhere. The last thing I do is mop all of the floors including the bathrooms. 

13. As you spring clean and declutter, break jobs into small chunks.

It is helpful to break your decluttering and cleaning tasks into small chunks and complete one task at a time. This way you can track your progress and avoid getting overwhelmed. This is especially important if you happen to have ADHD.

Schedule a coaching call, virtual organizing session, or a home assessment with me, and get the support and encouragement you need to move forward.