Almost two weeks ago when I started Spring Cleaning, I started by cleaning and putting our winter gear away. Of course, the following week, the temperature plummeted and it snowed! I’m trying not to take that as a sign that I should give up. My version of Spring Cleaning is low stress spring cleaning – no timeframes, no lists. I’m doing one task at a time, roughly once a week when I have the motivation to go beyond daily cleaning tasks. This week I tackled the curtains.

Low Stress Spring Cleaning Method

The reason why I didn’t say this was a NO stress process was because cleaning beyond our daily tasks adds a little to a lot more stress to your day. There might be some people out there who actually enjoy the process, but I certainly am not one of them. I will admit though that it does feel great to complete a task that really needed to be done.

The Second Spring Cleaning Project: Our curtains

Our curtains were purchased at Ikea and I think I bought the cheapest ones soon after we moved into our house. It wasn’t necessarily a well thought out purchase but they did the job of adding some color (the orange curtains) and blocking out light (the dark grey ones in two of our bedrooms).

I’m embarrassed to say that I think we’ve washed our curtains once in the time they’ve been hanging. When I took them down – the dust on them spoke to the years of neglect. For those of you who love cleanliness, you might want to skip this series because it is going to horrify you how infrequently I deep clean.

These curtains got stuck in the window when it was shut once and they got soaked with water. I’m not sure when that was…I’ve been turning a blind eye to it for so long.

The Process

The process was straight forward:

1. Take the curtains down.
2. Hold your breath so you won’t breathe in the dust from the curtains.
3. Quickly throw them in the washer reminding yourself that at least they’re getting washed now.
4.  Dry them. It was even Spring-like today and we hung them up outside to dry.
5. Hang them back up.

Resisting the Urge to Over Do It

I can certainly see why people do spring cleaning in a weekend or a week. When I took the curtains down, I could see that the top of the window frames needed dusting. Pulling the curtains back also showed me the windows that could use a good cleaning. The extra sunlight of course shows dusty baseboards and ceiling fans…the list could go on and on.

I probably will make a list for myself to remind myself to do these things because as I’ve mentioned before, I do have a problem with slob vision and I won’t notice these areas that need to be cleaned for a long time.

Some spring cleaning tasks that I know I want to do are: wash windows, clean baseboards, shampoo the carpets downstairs, and do a deep clean of our oven and the stove burners. I’ll see if I can get the family to participate and do a spring project of repainting the walls and baseboards – they desperately need it!

What low stress spring cleaning are you doing this week? I’d love to know in the comments!

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