April 2008
It's not popular, easy or fun, but slow-style spring cleaning will make you feel as if you dropped 50 pounds and rewound the clock 10 years. Your home didn't get messy in a day, and it won't get clean in two. Six weeks might sound like a long time to devote to cleaning, but first, you won’t spend every one of the next 40 days mopping Cinderella-style, and second, when was the last time you really cleaned?
Here's a guide to doing it right — and taking your time.
Week One: Foundation Cleaning
Spend an hour “company cleaning.” Hurry, they’ll be here any minute! This is not time to organize closets. This is time to cram. Get your whole family involved. It doesn’t take any skill to shove underwear in the top drawer until it barely closes. What you’re looking for here is looks-great-but-don’t-look-too-close.
Clean the room you love the most. If you love the mudroom, pack away the winter boots, hats and mittens. If it’s the kitchen, weed the cupboards and drawers. Office? File or toss the papers covering your photocopier. The point is to put everything in its place, and if it doesn’t have a place then throw it or give it away. Once you have an unobstructed view of the space, clean it. This means dust and sweep everything. Wash the baseboards and windows. Wipe the juice box stains off the wall.
Take the rest of the week off. Cleaning like this can be traumatic.
Week Two: The Procrastination Pit
Get it over with. You know the room. The only way to stop procrastinating is to stop procrastinating. If you avoid this room because it’s so depressingly trashed, don’t go it alone. As long as it’s safe, get the family involved. Call your best friend. Eat out every night this week because tackling this kind of mess requires single-mindedness.
Have some sort of emotional collapse because some of this stuff you haven’t laid eyes on in a decade. How many brandy snifters did newlyweds need in 1998? And that locket your mother-in-law gave you when your first child was born? How did that end up here?
Week Three: Bacteria Central
Blast the kitchen and the bathroom(s) with disinfectant. The claims of all-natural cleaning products are admirable, but if you’re only going to clean like this once a year bring on the bleach.
You might be feeling resentful because you’ve been cleaning like some 1950s homemaking diva for three weeks. Meanwhile, you’ve got your own life and it’d be nice to get a little help around here. Pick a fight with your partner, if you haven’t already. Unload generations of rage over the gender inequality of domestic labor.
Week Four: Babes in Toyland
Take a box and fill it with those special toys, like those red rings that came with the Toy-of-the-Month Club. Keep these. Never throw anything away that opens a portal to a happy memory. But really? Is that French-fry phone a portal to anything other than a nightmare once lived in the drive-thru during school vacation week?
Clean this room so that it looks like whatever catalog page that makes you sigh and wish it really possible to cha-ching childhood. Don’t worry; the illusion won’t last.
Play with your kids. There’s now room to set up every last track in the Brio/Thomas wooden train set.
Week Five: The Private Quarters
Flip the mattress. Clean the blinds. Dust the ceiling fan and vacuum under the bed and dressers.
Make up with the person who hasn’t dared look at you in a week because you’ve been crazy with all this cleaning.
Sleep. Or something like that.
Week Six: Entertainment Central
These are the areas, like the living and dining rooms that are usually kept most tidy since you never know who might stop by.
Clean like you usually don’t.
Six weeks later, your house is now clean. Invite some friends over and show it off! Tell them to bring the kids and before you know it you’ll have your mess back. But that’s OK.
There’s always next spring.