SPRING INTO ACTION
Before you know it, you’ll want to spend all your time outdoors, so get that indoor seasonal overhaul done and dusted with these motivating expert tips
Spring is in the air, and so is the faintly daunting, lemony-fresh scent of spring cleaning. For many, now is the time to don those trusty yellow rubber gloves and get to work scrubbing away a year’s worth of grime and scuff marks, but it's easy to take one look around your well-loved home and shrivel up at the thought of tackling it all.
Toronto-based home expert and content creator Wendy Lau (a.k.a. @thekwendyhome) knows that feeling well and has made it her mission to make spring cleaning feel more approachable and less overwhelming for her combined 1.5 million followers. Lau's systematic approach not only makes the chore feel doable, it actually makes it feel fun (yes, really). “When my guests leave, that’s when the party starts for me!” she says with a laugh. Here she shares her tips for beating spring cleaning overwhelm.
Break it down room by room
It may be tempting to try and tackle a big house-wide job like cleaning windows or baseboards first, but Lau says the key to success is breaking down your cleaning regimen into bite-sized pieces. “I do one room a week because I want breathing room,” she explains. She recommends compiling a short, itemized list of tasks for each room, with the goal of accomplishing one task per day. When drafting your list, skip the regular maintenance chores like wiping down counters or mirrors: “My spring cleaning list is really the stuff you only do annually or biannually,” she explains, citing the fridge, laundry machine, oven and mattress as examples of things that get the proper spring cleaning treatment.
Reward yourself
A clean room is certainly a gift in itself, but to really up the ante, Wendy has a simple method: “If I accomplish my weekly goal, I get to reward myself by giving myself a treat for that room,” she explains. “For every room, I’ve assigned something that I’ve wanted throughout the year. It can be something small like a bouquet of flowers, or a candle for your kitchen to light when it’s done. That reward motivates me to continue to the next room. Because it's not a race, but a marathon.”
Start with the worst
“I always tackle the most overwhelming project first,” Lau says. For her, that’s her “Monica Closet” — a nod to "Friends" clean freak Monica Geller’s secret closet of clutter. “Everyone has that one closet where they shove everything” says Lau. “I know if I keep that task for later on, I’ll lose steam so easi- ly.” Tackling your most-cluttered space first also gives you the opportunity to begin the process of selling or donating items you’re no longer using, Lau says. It also makes the rest of your overall project feel a bit more breezy.
Make it a game
Some of Lau's favourite ways to approach cleaning turn the chore into a game, adding a bit of thrill to the mundane. Playing with time and “racing against the clock” is an easy way to accomplish a lot quickly, she says: “Try timing yourself. You always think a task will take way longer than it does, but once you clock it and realize it only took 10 minutes to see the results, it’s amazing!”
Another method Lau discovered through her content creation was filming herself on a time-lapse: “It’s incredibly rewarding to watch a room go from before to after” she explains, adding that you can simplify this even more by taking a picture from the same spot before and after. “The immediate sero- tonin of seeing the results of your hard work is so rewarding.”