Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Want a clean and organized home? I have a SECRET trick for you! | Clutterbug Podcast # 124

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

Spring cleaning, decluttering and home organizing can seem like overwhelming and daunting tasks. The truth is, the expectations you put on yourself are probably just WAY too high. Stop overcomplicating spring cleaning, lower your expectations and watch your home magically become cleaner and more organized!        You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're going to talk about how lowering our expectations when it comes to cleaning can actually give us a cleaner space. Hey, clutterbugs and welcome back to the clutterbug podcast. Today we're going to talk about spring cleaning. We're going to talk about expectations and why we sort of see cleaning as a negative thing and why we procrastinate doing it or some of us just don't do it very often at all. Last podcast, I did talk a lot about our childhood connection and how. it really goes hand in hand with how we manage our house today as adults. So if you grew up in a household that was generally pretty messy, if your family didn't declutter very often or make letting go of things part of a routine, if you didn't do the dishes on a regular basis or

keep up on laundry and have these schedules that you just grew up with, things that were ingrained in you, habits that are learned, it's really hard to know how to do these things as an adult. This is definitely a learned behavior, but the other side is also true. So I talked a little bit about my mom and my experience growing up in a household that was overly cleaned. My mom has a lot of anxiety and she really managed and sort of self-medicated that anxiety with compulsive cleaning. I think it gave her a sense of control. It made her feel calm. And so she, this is anytime she was stressed out. Honestly, anytime she had free time, she would constantly be cleaning our house. Especially, it was, it was like to the infinity and beyond when it came to spring cleaning.

So seeing this as a child, I realized, I mean, I guess I thought all adults cleaned like this. And I really thought cleaning was this horrible, negative, all-encompassing, overwhelming thing. And I also had this all-or-nothing approach. So when I became an adult and a young adult, I rebelled. I didn't want to be like my mother. I didn't want to clean all the time. And I thought to have a clean house, you had to be that type of person that was constantly cleaning. And so I didn't clean at all. And still to this day, even though I've learned how to organize and take shortcuts and sort of embrace the good enough cleaning and I have a very tidy clean home, I still get sort of this uncomfortable feeling when I think about the fact that I have to clean a house. And

especially when I think about spring cleaning. For the longest time, I thought spring cleaning was stripping everything away and scrubbing every single thing. I thought it was moving out all the furniture, washing behind everything. My mom used to take all the screens out of the windows and we would scrub them with a scrub bush outside for hours and hours. She would say that a window wasn't clean unless it was cleaned three times. So we would first wash a window with soapy water. And and then we would go over it again with just a cloth and like to rinse the soap off and water in a cloth and then finally we would clean it with windex and newspaper to shine the windows so this was an all-day event and this was only one of many days as part of the spring cleaning ritual which involved flipping mattresses and vacuuming every crack and crevice in our house she would hand wash and polish every crystal on every chandelier and all the light fixtures, even light bulbs were cleaned and dusted, walls were washed, like washed with a bucket of soapy water. As a grown up, I'm like, ain't nobody got time for that.

And even when my house was under control, the idea of spring cleaning, first I thought, well, I'll have to tidy first and I'll have to clean everything up first, like all the laundry, and put all the piles away and pick up all the toys, before I possibly could start the deep clean of my house. But life is life. And tidying takes time and picking things up and catching up on laundry and doing the dishes. That's sometimes all we can manage. So how could we possibly spring clean on top of that? And talking to friends now as an adult and family members, people are like, oh, I have to take some time off work to spring clean my house.

And this is like this normal expectation that we have. This is this sort of lie that we've been fed that. that to spring clean our house, it's a week-long affair or it's this insane undertaking and we have to basically uproot our entire lives and just go crazy bananas on our house. And that expectation stops us from doing it. In truth, it really does. The expectation of what spring cleaning entails or what sometimes even just cleaning our house, what it's supposed to look like, what we're supposed to be doing, what's the right way to do it, it seems so overwhelming that we just duck and hide. We just do anything else. We just avoid this at absolutely all costs. I want to help you lower your expectations.

I want to help you look at cleaning your house in a different light. And I really hope if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, I've been able to help you change the way you think about organization. Organizing isn't one size fits all. There are different organizing styles and you have to really discover what works for you. I also hope after listening to this podcast, that you've taken some pressure off yourself and sort of embrace that good enough organization for your home and set up systems that catch your clutter exactly where you drop things. But now I want to talk about how we can use that same philosophy and apply it to cleaning our house. I think we need everybody cleans different and we really need to understand what works for us

and what doesn't. Some people really love zone cleaning, which means they divide their home up into zones. Maybe they do bedrooms one day and living room another day, kitchen another day, bathrooms on another day. And then there are people who task clean. So maybe one day they'll vacuum everything and another day they'll do floors or another day they'll dust. And some people like me, we're speed cleaners. We do a little bit of everything either every day or every few days, more random speed cleaning. Knowing what works for you and what doesn't can really help you come up with a routine. for that daily maintenance stuff that just makes it less daunting and makes you just actually

get up off the couch and do some of the cleaning. But with spring cleaning, there's so many routines online. There's so many different things that you can look up and they're all insane. I even have some spring cleaning checklist that are that I used to do years ago that are over the freaking top. How can you fit this into your schedule? You are working. You've got kids, you're busy, you have activities, you have any type of life at all. How do you possibly fit these insane things in? Well, the answer is you just don't. And so I want to make it really approachable. I want to make it realistic and I want to give you my new routine to maybe inspire you to lower those expectations and still deep clean and freshen your home for spring. So what I do is I think

of my home like a three-layer cake. The middle layer is the layer that generally we actually clean pretty regularly. It's the top of the kitchen counters, the top of the dresser, your surfaces that are sort of waste to eye level. We're wiping the middle of our home all the time. So when it comes to spring cleaning my house, I just like to take one hour and just hit it high. Do all the high stuff that gets neglected, the top of my windowsills, my curtain rods, my light fixtures. I want to do the top of the appliances and just anything high, the spot on the wall above the stove, not my entire wall. I'm just focusing on going high and this is keeping me focused. I do have ADHD so sometimes I'll start a task in one room and I'll sort of flutter from space to space or I'll go up high and I'll go low

and next thing you know I'm sorting and I'm cleaning and I'm picking up clutter. and I want you to know that before you clean your house for spring, before you spring clean your space, you don't have to tidy it first. It doesn't have to be clean before you can clean. We can just focus on actually getting the cobwebs out of the corner, wiping down the tops of our cabinets, doing the high stuff that we neglect, and that's good enough. And then I focus on low. So I get on my hands and knees and I just have a cloth, a damp rag, And I just get low stuff. So cold air returns, any of my furnace vents, baseboards, the bottom of my furniture, like the legs of my chairs, the legs of my sofa, the legs of any side tables. They're always like super disgustingly gross. And I just go around to my hands and knees and just wipe stuff.

It isn't perfect. I'm just getting the globs of goo, especially the kickplate in my kitchen under my kitchen cabinets. I crawl around and do all that. and my entire house can be done in under an hour. I have bad knees. I really should get knee pads when I do this. But it's fast. It's simple.

I've taken out the overthinking. I've taken out the expectations. And I've done a deep clean of my house. And then I focus on two other areas. I give my fridge a good wipe and I throw out any expired food, expired condiments. I timed myself doing this the last two times that I did it. and both of these were under 15 minutes. We don't worry about organization.

We're not going full home at it and putting all our fruit and vegetables and rainbow colors. We're just getting rid of things that have expired and we're wiping down the shelves. End story. This is important to do it during the spring and cleaning your windows. Cleaning your windows is going to let in more light. It's going to feel bright. And over the winter, your windows can get really dingy, which makes your home feel sort of dirty and dingy.

I honestly, this is not sponsored, but I 100% recommend getting the Windex, either the Windex window cleaning pads that you put on top of, it comes with like a stick, but you can also put an extender on it. My windows are really high, so I put an extra broom handle on the end. And I just dampen the pad, rub it all over the windows, and rinse it off with the hose, and you're done. They're streak free. They're beautiful.

It's under 15 minutes to do all. all of my windows, no pressure, no going crazy like my mom, doing it three times and doing it with the windex in the newspaper and getting on a ladder. You don't have to do any of that. We can literally have clean windows and cheat our way there with a $15 window cleaning kit that Windex makes. Why wouldn't we do that? Now, this only works, of course, if your screens are on the inside of your windows and the glass, you know, is on the outside, you can just spray it really quickly. But yeah, just take a shortcut. And that's it.

That's all I do for spring cleaning. Sometimes I will vacuum my mattresses if I feel like it. Sometimes I might move furniture out to vacuum behind. But not always. I just hit it high. I hit it low. I do the windows and I do the fridge and I move on. I've lowered those expectations so it's realistic.

And I can do all of these things in four hours on a Saturday afternoon and I feel so good about myself. I want to take a second to thank KiwiCo for sponsoring today's podcast. Now that it's spring, my family's really looking forward to planting flowers in our garden. It's warmer. We're going to spend lots of time outside, but it's also a really great time of year to just introduce new things to my kids. Every single month we get a crate in the mail and this day that the box arrives is totally the favorite day of the month for my kids. Usually we get the tinker crate because we love teaching our kids about math, science, and engineering. Right now, we're going to go ahead with the Atlas crate for spring, and we're getting the kite

making kit and the maker crate we're going to get in this spring too, so we can make hanging flower pots for the kids' windows. As a parent, I really want to get my kids off their screen. I want them to do creative things. I want them to learn and see how fun it can be to actually do art and science and Kiwi-Co makes it easy. There's something for all ages and there's absolutely no commitment. Step into spring and celebrate the season of discovery with a Kiwi-Co subscription box. Get 30% off your first month plus free shipping on any crate line with the code clutter at kiwi-co.com. That's 30% off your first month at k-I-W-C-O-com promo code clutter. I can't talk about and spring cleaning without talking about something that is really important that we do this time

a year and that's declutter. The general rule is every time we bring something new into our home, we're supposed to get something out that's the same size. So the one in one out rule. We buy new flip flaps. We should let go of an old pair or an old pair of shoes. We're at the mall. We get a new shirt. An old shirt has to go. But we don't do this very rarely. Or like some people do, but I definitely do not. I'm thinking about Christmas and all the gifts that we got and we're going to have Easter gifts coming up and birthday gifts coming in. We're always having things come into our home. Even if we're not big shoppers or big accumulators, there are bags and bags and bags of things coming into our home over 365 days a year. And how often are you getting out bags and bags and bags of things from your home? And the answer is not nearly as often. And some of the biggest offenders that fill up our home, home are things like shoes and clothing and makeup and bathroom supplies. Maybe we are getting band-aids or medications over the winter. We have a lot of colds. Maybe you have aspirants and cough medicine. But are we getting things out at the same rate? Another big offender is sheets and towels and

blankets. These take up a ton of space and as we start getting our older ones wearing out, sometimes we'll replace them with fresh new ones, but we're not letting the old ones go, we hold on to them just in case. And this seems like not a big deal, but all of these little things that we're holding on to add up to a full home. And when your home is full, it's overwhelming. You have too much inventory, not only to manage physically and find homes for and try to find the things you need and your stuff shuffling things around, but mentally too. We need to really think about the mental toll that our stuff takes on us. We have to remember everything we own and remember where it is in our house.

And this is taking up a lot of brain space. And I see the correlation. I see the correlation with clients that I'm working with. It's very clear. The more cluttered somebody's home is, the less focus a person has, the more overwhelmed they are. and the less likely they are to actually accomplish tasks because their brain is full. Your brain is already full with so many things remembering appointments and birthdays and things you have to do and things at work and things at home and all the things we have

to think about dinners and laundry and cooking and grocery shopping. And we also have to think about where everything is, where to find it, how to put it away, how much of each thing we have. And it's too much for our brains. So I want you to consider this spring to do the 40 bag challenge. The 40 bag challenge is every day for 40 days you fill a trash bag of things to leave your house. This can be trash or this can be donations. But 40 bags are leaving your house.

And I know this sounds like a lot, but I declutter 40 bags quite often. 40 bags is an average amount of garbage bags that should leave your house. house on a yearly basis. This is old pillows, this is old blankets, clothing that doesn't fit, toys your children have outgrown, expired food, expired medication, bathroom products that you just don't love. Forty bags sounds like a massive amount of stuff. But really, it's very doable. It's a small bit of things from each and every room will add up to a huge amount of things out of your house and also out of your mind. You're going to see how much calmer you feel, how much more focused you are, how much more motivated you are, how much more energy you have,

and how much better your life is when you get things out. We're lowering the expectations. We're not sorting. We're not making a ton of piles. You're grabbing a bag and you're looking around your home. You're opening drawers, you're opening cabinets, you're opening that linen, closet. Listen, those old sleeping bags, if you don't camp, they can go. Extra suitcases, they can go. Books you're never going to read. Gone. Leaving your house. Clothing that doesn't fit, that's toxic. Say goodbye. Fill some bags. You can do this. Don't overthink it. Start fresh this spring by spring cleaning your home, hitting it high, hitting it low, doing a quick wipe of everything. more importantly, start filling a bag every single day for 40 days. And by the summer,

you're going to have a home that you deserve. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you guys next time.