Spring is here, but that doesn’t mean your house is necessarily ready. Most of us think that the transition from winter to spring is just about enjoying the warmer weather. But those of us who entertain know that there is some serious deep cleaning that goes into that transition if you plan to have guests over.
When thinking about preparing for the spring and your upcoming spring parties, think about professional floor and fabric cleaning options, along with regular cleaning, to really get your home ready.
What Does it Take to Prepare for Spring Entertaining?
The key here is “freshness.” When we move from winter to spring, we are really moving from being cooped up in our homes, away from the cold weather, and out into the warmth of the sun. Open windows. Open doors. This is when we want to feel the fresh air and the sun on our bodies, and we want to bring the warmth into our homes.
To prepare for the spring, you need to prepare your home to let that happiness and warmth in. When you entertain in the spring, you aren’t going to ask your guests to stand by a fire or sit in a living room. People will move around, and they will move outside. They’ll expect lighter food and a fresher mood.
So, cleaning for spring, and expecting that you will be entertaining, means opening your home to the outside and cleaning off the dust of winter for the clean, warm, freshness of spring.
There are a few steps on this spring-cleaning checklist that will help you to drill down, clean deep, and uncover all that leftover grime and dust.
Surface Cleaning: Bathrooms and Kitchens
The first step is to clean the surfaces of your home, especially in your bathroom, kitchen, and living rooms.
“Isn’t that deep cleaning?” You might be asking us. No. We are talking about literally cleaning the surfaces.
- Kitchen: Clean out your fridge. Wipe it out, throw away old food, and disinfect it. Clean off your appliances and your cabinets (inside and out). Mop the floor.
- Bathroom: Clean out the toilet and the shower with real mildew-removing cleaner. Pull out everything from your medicine cabinet and get rid of what you don’t need. Scrub all the surfaces.
Got it? Good. We aren’t going to spend time telling you how to clean your bathroom because we see that as the surface to the real deep cleaning that happens afterward. Make a bathroom cleaning checklist, a kitchen cleaning checklist, and get on it!
Deep Cleaning: Your Hardwood and Deep Carpet Cleaning
Now for the real deep cleaning. Your floors.
A few things happen over the winter that make deep cleaning your floors that much more important:
- Foot traffic doesn’t stop. In fact, it probably picks up more. And that foot traffic is walking through rain, dirty slush, snow… almost anything filthy and wet. It all comes in during the winter. With more people in the home, there are more opportunities for dirt to grind in.
- More people are in a central location. This means that those people are playing, drinking, and eating—which means they are making messes as well. Food and wine are particularly a problem over the winner with holiday parties, but a lot of food messes are going to make it into your floors (especially your carpets).
- Dust and dirt have settled into your carpeting over months and months of time. You may not see this dirt, but as time passes and your windows stay shut, moisture can work its way into your home. And then dirt and mildew start taking hold. They start circulating through your home, clogging your ducts, running through your heater and AC unit.
This means that dirt is ingrained in your home, especially the floors.
We recommend that as soon as winter turns into spring, it’s time to have a floor deep cleaning planned for your home, with two main areas of focus:
- Hard floors, like vinyl, tile, or hardwood. Have your kitchen floor cleaned. Have all the mildew from your tile and ground cleaned out properly by a professional. Have someone buff and polish your hardwood (and, if possible, restore any damage from the winter).
- Have a professional steam cleaner come in and clean every inch of carpeting in your home. Stairs, bedrooms, living spaces—it doesn’t matter. Get it all cleaned out.
Don’t try to do these things on your own. While you can rent a cleaner to handle small jobs, you should hand off your deep cleaning to professionals. Don’t rent a cruddy machine and re-deposit dirt and god knows what else in your home. Don’t cut corners. With a clean floor and carpet, your house will immediately lose that heavy feeling. It will smell better and look beautiful.
Freshening Up: Furniture, Rugs, and Air Circulation
If deep cleaning your carpet is important, then cleaning the supplementary fabric items in our home is even more important, if for no other reason than we skip them.
- Furniture: Get all your couches, chairs, loveseats, daybeds, and whatever other upholstered furniture you have professionally cleaned. These items collect the same kinds of dirt and odors that carpets do, so do not skip them.
- Area rugs. Don’t just take these outside to beat them and hang them out in the sun. Get a professional cleaner to get them cleaned out.
These items are a little trickier because different furniture and rugs have different cleaning methods depending on several variables like age, material, and weave. That’s why you should call a professional that can use the right cleaners and the right methods to get them taken care of.
And for your own benefit, make sure that you change out your air filters on your HVAC system and investigate whether you need a duct cleaning as well. If you don’t clean your ducts, you run the risk of letting all that dirt in the system get back into the air and back on your furniture.
Deep Cleaning Is Not Entirely DIY
We love to suggest DIY solutions to cleaning problems. But when you need to get things ready for spring parties, you want that deep-down cleaning that gets rid of winter odors and lightens the entire house. Professional cleaning is going to do that best.
Shake off winter and invite your spring guests into your home with a real deep cleaning.