Winter doesn’t last forever, and the seasonal thaw is just around the corner. Along with first blush of spring comes a yearly tradition more widely celebrated than any holiday: spring cleaning.
According to a survey conducted by the American Cleaning Institute, as many as 91 percent of Americans spring clean their homes after winter. Spring cleaning is often seen as a tedious chore but it’s an essential part of life, especially after spending months cooped up indoors.
However, many people take a haphazard or casual approach to spring cleaning. You may just run your vacuum cleaner over each room, dust bust a few shelves and call it a day. But this does not remove potentially dangerous pathogens or even scratch the surface of the dirt that tends to accumulate over months.
Learn some tips that can make your spring-cleaning routines more effective.
Carpets are some of the hardest to clean upholstery in any house. Sometimes it’s because of their sheer size, often encompassing the floor of an entire room. But they also harbor the most particles and organisms.
If you want to deep clean your carpet, don’t just run a vacuum on it. Without appropriate cleaning, your carpets can become breeding grounds of bacteria and even parasites.
First, use a stiff brush to work away any hair or fur and loosen the dust on it. Then you can use your carpet. Afterwards, it could be necessary to beat and shampoo your carpet if you can remove it from the floor. If you have extensive carpeting built into the floor, you may need to call a carpet cleaning service for assistance.
Most people spend a lot of winter cozy under their blankets on their mattresses. This means that there is an excess of dead skin cells and dirt trapped in them. There may also be bits of food or tiny spills on it if you are the type of person who enjoys snacks in bed. This makes mattresses the prime habitat for bed bugs.
Unless you’re vigilant and routinely clean your mattress, you could host a bed bug infestation. If it gets bad enough, bed bugs can get buildings condemned.
At the first opportunity, strip your mattress of bedding and take it outside to your yard or garage. Use a stick or a tennis racket to beat out dust and particles. Then leave it under the hot sun for at least two hours, flipping it over so the intense heat sanitizes it thoroughly. If you’re still unsure if its clean, take it to a specialist for more intense sanitation.
Cold weather outside and heating systems inside the house leads to some of the worst damp in any household. This can occur because frost gets melted by your furnace or from condensation on your windows. It can also be because of a leaky pipe or a damaged roof letting run off from snow drip down.
Damp can lead to black mold, a particularly noxious fungus that causes respiratory issues. Inspect your roof and indoor water features such as bathtub fixtures and under the sink for potential mold infestation. You should wear a mask and gloves when tackling black mold. There are a lot of cleaning chemicals and solutions available at every grocery you can use to beat black mold. Just scrub thoroughly and make sure to patch up the source of the leak, so it doesn’t happen again.
Attics are such liminal spaces that very few people probably bother cleaning them out, if at all. But they can be nesting grounds for many animals and insects, some of which can pose health risks to your house. Although this doesn’t mean your attic is home to flying spiders, it can mean there are rats, ants or cockroaches nesting among your stored belongings.
Rats can not only gnaw through precious antiques and turn books into mulch, but they can also harbor fleas. Their presence can also attract deadlier animals like snakes into your attic.
Once winter is over, take a brush, a broom and a bucket and clean up your attic. Check for any bolt holes pests could be using to enter and remove as much dust and debris as possible to deprive them of nesting grounds.
Spring cleaning doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t have to be haphazard. If you refine your routine, your home can be safe and comfortable for months. Improving your spring cleaning routine can give you and your loved ones the home you deserve, just in time for the first greenery of the year.
