Its Finally Spring here in the UK. Yep, I am going to get all cliché on you and give you my best tips and time saving strategies to get the most efficient jobs done in one day – so that you don’t spend your whole weekend cleaning (and exhausted) just to go back to work the next day! Why bother?
Here are some of my reasons to bother with a really good spring clean:
Having a dirty home can affect your health.
Just getting rid of dust, cleaning curtains, linens and carpets means that a year’s worth of dust which has settled in areas you don’t clean too regularly will be removed finally! If you don’t do it now, when will you do it?
Dirt can hide damage to your building envelope and can limit the amount of light entering your home.
Some cracks around the home can be harmless. If you have little patches of plaster on the floor, maybe behind a sofa or cupboard, you could easily miss it if you haven’t cleaned or even looked at that area in a while!
I also love having clean windows, especially in Spring, your really notice how much more light comes in. I never had this problem in Australia, but here in the UK the diesel cars really dirty the window and window sills.
Also, mould can cause real health problems not only to you but to your building! Read more in my blog post “Lifestyle habits to help you reduce mould in your home”
Dirty and cluttered surroundings can play on your subconscious mind and make you grumpy and negative.
If you are anything like me, when you see that pile of clothes on the floor (that everyone else seems to be able to ignore), or that dust pile in the corner of the bathroom, I think to myself “I need to get around to cleaning that”. Not only does that interrupt your thought process from whatever you were thinking about (which is probably way more important than “I gotta clean that”) you also bring your self down and get negative, especially when the thoughts turn to “someone else has to clean that” or “what a pig”. Wouldn’t it just be better to walk up the stairs and think, wow, what a beautiful day, it smells so fresh and clean up here.
It’s an opportunity to purge.
Yes I love Kon Mari and those two cleaning ladies Kim and Aggie and I have to admit that Id rather be watching “How clean is your house” rather than actually cleaning mine, but the last time I actually purged my wardrobe, I genuinely recycled and gave to charity more than half of what I had. I had just gotten so busy with moving from the flat to the new house that lots of it was still in boxes, the other derelict, ripped pieces were ”working clothes” that I kept for renovating , which came to an abrupt halt about 8 months ago…
My point is here that it is an opportunity to just finally get rid of that stuff, purging your sanity, home and life, making you that little bit more free.
The mess can waste your time.
So can living in cluttered space. Trying to find things, moving one thing to reach another, not bothering to get something at all because its just too difficult to get to… yep, I am ashamed to say that I have experienced it all (and still do). I also find things that I thought I should keep when I was moving “just in case” and now look at it a year later thinking ”really, why would I keep that – this is junk!” . A personal example is that I still haven’t renovated my kitchen but I find myself storing empty yoghurt pots for when I get a chance to paint again (once the kitchen is complete of course). Neither one of these things is on the horizon in the next 6 months, so I’m sure Il collect enough yogurt pots when the time comes – for now, they are taking up prime location in the little storage I currently have in my 16 year old, tiny kitchen.
This is usually also more critical in small spaces and smaller homes. If you want to read some lifestyle tips on living in smaller spaces, you can read those here.
It gives you a point in your life to press “reset”
Sometimes you just get to a point and you think, things need to change. Doing a spring clean can be a good precursor to that change. It give you time to think, re-evaluate what your goals are and why you are doing what you are doing in your life. It makes you think, “why am I holding onto these items?” or “I remember that I love to play squash, I should make time for that again.” Looking around at your surroundings can be a trigger for changing your life. I wrote about how noticing my surroundings changed mine when I wrote my post “Can your surroundings change your life?“
Right, so I have given you some good reasons to do a spring clean, but I will give you a week for this information to sink in and hopefully motivate you. Next Week, I will give you an action plan that you can follow.
Today, set a date – see it as a time for change, a day that things are going to move and shift physically and emotionally.