Spring is here! The clocks have lurched forward, and the sun has decided to grace us with its presence a little more often (albeit a little less often than we’d ideally like), and the time for a little bit of spring cleaning is overdue. Officially so, in fact, as National Spring Cleaning Week has already been and gone. If you haven’t gotten started yet, you’re already late to the game. But it’s better to start late than not at all.

Now, if you’re not naturally inclined toward keeping things tidy, then it might seem that you have a mammoth chore on your hands. It’s understandable, then, that you’ve put the task off until now. But with the right guidance, there’s no reason to delay a thorough spring clean any longer. Let’s take stock of the practice of Spring cleaning, and see how we might best go about it.

Why Spring Clean In The First Place?

Clutter isn’t just an eyesore. It can also influence your state of mind. A study by David Tolin, the founder of America’s Anxiety Disorder Centre in Connecticut, has found evidence for what most of us already know: If you spend all of your time surrounded by discarded crockery, loose cabling, scrunched-up shopping lists from several months ago, and all manner of other miscellanea, then the chances are that you’ll develop a sense of palpable claustrophobia.

Tolin’s study focussed on hoarding, monitoring participant’s obifrontal cortexes. This is the part of the brain most concerned with decision making, and found a distinct correlation between activity here and clutter in the home. An untidy home really does lead to stress – and there are now magnetic-resonance images which prove it!

As well as the stress, there’s the social stigma attached to untidiness. You might become ashamed of your untidy home, and stop inviting your friends and family over. You might even have so little room that you couldn’t host them even if you wanted to!

By keeping on top of this throughout the year, you’ll be able to keep the clutter at bay. But even the best of us are tempted to delay doing so, and so a little bit of dust and debris can quickly spiral upward into a mountain of it. Setting aside hours of your time to get things in order again can then prove difficult.

That’s why the annual Spring clean has developed into something resembling a ritual. By setting aside a few days to really focus on the task at the expense of all others, you’ll be able to properly conquer it. What’s more, if you make it a ceremony, you’ll be better able to overcome any sentimental attachment you’ve formed to those items that you really need to let go of and sling into the dustbin.

Once you get going with your spring clean, it can even be fun – you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing your home transform before your eyes into something more hospitable. You might even feel yourself getting less stressed as the process unfolds! Depending on how much ground you’ve got to cover, you can either take an entire week to do it, or you can cram your work into just a few days.

A List of Spring Cleaning Supplies

If you’re going to do this right, then you’ll need to make sure you’ve put together the necessary equipment before you get going. There’s nothing more likely to make you abandon the task than getting to a crucial stage and then realise you’re missing something essential. Before you get started, check to see whether you have the items on the following list to hand, before making a quick trip to your local supermarket and pick up anything that’s missing.

• Bin Liners
• All-purpose cleaning spray
• Baking Soda
• Cotton Swabs
• Floor Polish
• Dustpan and Brush
• Broom
• Vacuum cleaner
• Toilet Brush
• Rubber Gloves
• Microfibre cloth
• Labels
• Duster
• Oven cleaner
• Broom
• Bleach
• Scrubbing brushes
• Mop
• Storage containers

A Spring Cleaning To-Do List

Spring cleaning is something that’s been done for ages, and so you’ll find a wealth of opinion and information about how best to proceed online. Let’s look at some of the best resources on the topic.

How to Spring Clean Room-by-Room; a Checklist by Spring Cleaning Week

This comprehensive guide will guide you through every stage of the cleaning process. It goes into detail about the tasks that need to be done, and the order in which you should do them, but it comes neatly broken down with a table of contents so that you need never feel overwhelmed. They’ve even crammed in some sneaky tips into the bottom of each section, so that you’ll be able to improve your process with minimal reading.

The Ultimate Spring Cleaning Checklist; a checklist by Christine Satterfield over at idreamofclean.net

This rather exhaustive list offers an alternative to the one we’ve just looked at, and covers much of the same ground. There are some entries that you’ll want to skip: if you don’t have a pantry or chimney, then you won’t need to organise or sweep them. The majority of the entries here are worthwhile, however, and so it’s worth running through the list to see if there’s anything you haven’t considered.

Final Thoughts on Spring Cleaning

As we’ve seen, spring-cleaning is a large task, but it’s one that’s well worth doing. Once you’ve gotten the necessary supplies in place, you’ll also be better able to deal with all of those little tasks that come after you’re done with the big clean itself.

If you feel like you’ve just run a marathon after you’re done with your clean, then it’s worth resolving to keep on top of your cleaning over the course of the year to come. That way you won’t have such a lot to do the next time spring rolls around. Prevention, as they say, is better than cure – and if you’ve got a sizeable pile of cleaning supplies in place, there’s no excuse not to keep on top of your cleaning duties over the course of the coming year.