Tips to Spring Clean & Organize Your Home

It’s that time of the year again! As the weather starts to warm up and we trade sweatshirts for t-shirts, it’s the perfect time to organize and spring clean your home. After all, once summer comes and there’s beach days, BBQs, and vacations to enjoy, the last thing you’ll want to do is work on indoor house tasks. Be proactive and set yourself up for summertime success by taking care of chores now, so you can play later. Here are some spring cleaning tips and ideas to inspire you to get organized! 

Donate Things You No Longer Need

House cleaning and staying organized is a lot easier when you have less things in your way! Books you’ve already read, trinkets that no longer make you smile, or clothing you rarely wear may be cluttering your home when they could be getting used by someone else. Take a look around each room, closet, cupboard, and garage and see what jumps out at you as no longer being needed and set aside to donate. Start piles for things to donate or list on websites for someone to pick-up — even if you think an old chair is no good anymore, you’d be surprised how many people may enjoy fixing it up! 

You can list items for free on sites like Offer Up or Craigslist. If you are on Facebook, several neighborhoods in San Diego have “buy nothing” groups full of people happy to take your items off your hands. San Diego also has a lot of local charities who will gladly give your items a new home. Streamlining your home while helping a neighbor? Sounds like a win-win! 

Do it In Waves

Trying to tackle all your home organization chores at once can be overwhelming and make you reluctant to start. Instead, organize your cleaning into short, manageable chunks of time, like 15 minutes. That’s plenty of time to vacuum baseboards, clean light switches, or dust a ceiling fan. Give yourself a short break, then go for another 15 minutes, and soon you’ll have checked many items off your spring cleaning checklist. 

Go Room by Room

If chunking your chores into time buckets isn’t your style, try doing one room at a time instead. Evaluate each room and make a list of everything that needs to be done, then work through them until you have one perfect, sparkling clean room. If you end up just hanging out in that room and ignoring the others for as long as possible, it’s understandable! 

Digital Deep Clean

When’s the last time you cleared unused apps off your phone, or deleted your computer’s trash? Some of us spend just as much time on our devices as we do enjoying the rooms in our home, so it’s important to keep these clean and organized, too. Organize your folders and documents, delete unnecessary screenshots or photos, and change your wallpaper to something that makes you happy. 

Involve the Kids

If you have kids, help create good lifelong habits by letting them be in charge of cleaning their own space. Make it fun by playing everyone’s favorite music, turn tasks into timed games (who will be done organizing their toys first?), or hide prizes like stickers or treats where they may “find” them while cleaning. 

Make sure you schedule some downtime afterwards to sit and enjoy your newly clean space!