Keeping Spring Cleaning Sane

You know its bad when the broom and the vacuum break in the same week, just as you begin spring cleaning.

At this point spring cleaning is not a huge, do-everything-in-one-week job. It is going to take a while, because we are keeping it down to reasonable chunks without exhausting ourselves.

We are focusing on just one task a day, not a whole room. We've already done the freezer and the refrigerator, and the living room furniture.

Doing one room at a time sounds reasonable but often there just isn't the time or energy to do that. The living room may be easy enough: pushing all the furniture into the center of the room and vacuuming the edges and the cushions and putting things back.

On the other hand, the kitchen is more easily done one or two cabinets at a time. Mainly because of moving everything to the kitchen table cleaning the cabinet and the stuff and putting it back in. We still haven't found a really good solution to how our stuff should be arranged so we move things around from time to time. After three tries I am getting less hopeful about finding a better then barely adequate solution.

But then some rooms are all-or-nothing, like the bathroom, you really have to clean the whole thing in one shot or you end up doing it all over again anyway.

It is also time to fix things that can be fixed and just do it and get it out of the way. At this point if I find something broken and is not worth fixing it is time to toss/recycle, if it is mostly used and we haven't used it in recent memory we'll toss it too. A box for the truck of the car is in the living room

For things that work and that we haven't used in a while: a donate/sell box is in the living room. When we get to the closet and dressers that will get filled up and get put in the trunk of the car as it fills up.