0 Helpful Spring Cleaning Tips to Make You Feel Better About the State of Your Home

There are lots of articles about spring cleaning circulating around the internet right now. Which makes me want to dust. But also REALLY not want to dust.

I’ll cut to the chase here and let you know this post will provide no good spring cleaning tips. For that see here and here. I didn’t write those but they have great tips and are written by lovely people.

What I’ll add to the narrative is a way to help you avoid spring cleaning by providing a nonsense article that you can tell your significant other is helping you spring clean because spring cleaning is in the title. I even threw in a cleaning stock image up at the top there you can show him/her real quick in case they suspect that you’re lying.

In reality this is a brain dump of things that came to mind about cleaning while I was taking a shower. In a shower that needs to be cleaned.

The Resentful Minimalist

Since we are currently surrounded by 1 million toys, that my son the other day told me to watch while he went to the bathroom to “make sure they don’t come alive,” I’m trying to minimize the rest of the house. If the toys do come alive, I’d like for them not to judge the number of unused vases I have in cabinets.

Or beat me to death with the unnecessary 5th umbrella.

In order to effectively minimalize, we watched The Minimalists documentary on Netflix. Honestly, sitting down to watch this was more of an effort to be hip and intellectual, but now as a result I’m spending too much time on the weekends deciding which cleaning products in my house bring me joy.

The answer is none of them, so I think The Minimalists need to loosen up their criteria unless they want my countertops to start growing algae.

Really Get Up In There

Back to cleaning. Kind of. I thought I would vacuum under the cushions of my couch the other day because, I don’t know, self-care?

I found a fork in there.

Not even a kid fork. An adult fork. Also three Christmas decorations, raisins that were starting to turn into wine, six playing cards, numerous Kix, and earrings that I don’t think belong to me but now they do because of the squatters’ rights in Massachusetts.

That’s really nothing though compared to the corn on the cob of August 2016.

There is something oddly satisfying about vacuuming out a really gross undercouch. You can see AND hear the dirt and poor parenting choices being sucked right up into the tube.

Ah, clean slate. To change absolutely nothing.

Cleaning Where the Sun Don’t Shine

As adults we are supposed to clean inside our houses AND outside our houses. Gahhhh… society.

This really became a problem when the leaves in New England didn’t fall until after the first snow. Because now we are left with three feet of wet leaves. And my kids are NOT being helpful about it.

I tried to rake the other day and both Jack and Norah mistook this chore for fun fall raking instead of tedious paper mache leaf extraction. My piles of wet sadness were soon flattened into compacted wet sadness after they had been joyfully jumped upon.

I’ve never been so conflicted about a confluence of emotions in my life.

Baby You Can Clean My Car

My friends, The Salty Mamas, shared a very real-life photo of their car after moving a car seat which highlights that squirrels have nothing on a small child’s ability to hoard away foodstuffs for the winter. This photo was met with internet people commenting about how they vacuum their cars every day and (clutch my pearls) they would never let their car look like that.

I hope those people never look at the floor mats of my car.

Or if they are going to look at my car mats, I hope they bring their apparently very easy to maneuver and fun to use vacuum. Because I haven’t actually seen our floor mats since 2016. I think they are black?

All I know for sure is that my entire family could survive for a week if we were ever stranded on the road in a snowstorm. That’s called emergency preparedness.