Spring Cleaning

photo: Eric Diesel

There are two schools of thought regarding spring cleaning: do it by room or do it by task. (Actually, there’s a third – don’t do it – but I’m not sure what to write for that contingent, except perhaps God bless you). The wisest plan of attack might depend on the size of the home you’re spring-cleaning: for larger spaces, cleaning by room might make sense. However, I do it by task. 

In part, this is because that is how I learned: my grandmother did it that way. Deep cleaning the house was among the rites with which she welcomed spring. Spring arrived early and got warm quick on that northeastern fringe of the Sun Belt. As soon as a handyman fastened the screens in place, my grandmother opened the windows to let the breezes through. She firmly believed that a cool breeze cleaned as thoroughly as any chemical, a trait I have found that I have inherited.

Her home was a western bungalow that anyone who grew up among them would recognize: white clapboard with ivy green trim, with a front porch with flower boxes and metal chairs, a screened-in back porch where she did her sewing, and a Hoosier kitchen that truly was the heart of the home. On the property were a garden with a shed and a boarded-up well house that provided habitat for the bats I befriended. Just off of the back steps was a picnic shed with an oaken trestle table and benches to be taken out of storage for Friday night cookouts. Raspberry and blackberry briars stood guard beneath the bedroom windows while the porch was surrounded by hydrangeas. Black walnut trees on the northern exposure shot spiky black casings to the grass to vex the neighborhood kid who mowed the lawn, while on the southern exposure stood a lone paw-paw tree whose strange fruit I assumed everyone knew about and ate until I moved north and learned otherwise.

Outside, everything from the wooden eaves of the roof to the cement slab of the porch got blasted with the garden hose – to this day, one of my favorite smells is wet cement.  That was my cue to get ready to work, even as cousins made themselves scarce. The real work was inside, where awaited lists of tasks to be accomplished throughout the house.  Then as now, nothing was as satisfactory as checking off an item as completed.  Buckets flowed with suds as we washed the walls and chamois cloths glistened with oil as we polished the wood.  Older cousins who got the job of cleaning the windows got the reward of cleaning the mirrors (is anything as nice as the sparkle in freshly cleaned glass)?  I hand-washed all of the depression glass from the display case in the dining room; the pattern was Florentine and the color was yellow.  Household linens were inventoried and changed from the cold months' stark green and white to a warm-weather palette of cream and mint. The last of the previous summer’s canning was inspected both to see that the seals were still good and to decide which items had been enough of a hit during the year to bear replenishing the following August.

Based on this not inconsiderable learning experience, and updated from my own experiences as a homekeeper,  I have created a plan to help you do a thorough but manageable job of spring cleaning. Click here for a free downloadable and printable copy.  I hope it helps you turn spring cleaning from a chore into an opportunity to reconnect with your home. I think it all begins with those cleansing breezes.  For what is spring cleaning but a yearly opportunity to welcome comfort, safety and, yes, cleanliness into that most important of places: our home?