Top Spring Cleaning Tips 2023 – Part 1

Don’t have much time until guests arrive and your house is messy? Do these things before you start moving about the house like a human hurricane trying to clean everything in a hurry. Take a deep breath, fix your eyes on Jesus and who you are in Him, ask Him for peace in your heart then…

• Tackle the floors first – your floors always makes the house look either cleaner or dirtier than it is. So pick clutter up off the floor, sweep, mop your way to a cleaner looking home!
• Light candles and/or put some essential oils in some reed diffusers (or cotton balls if you’re REALLY in a pinch) and put them everywhere around your house. If you’re doing cotton balls, hide them underneath the bag at the bottom of your trash can, in closets, etc.
• Have designated, attractive clutter bins of various sizes staged around the house to just stick things in until you can deal with them later. If you don’t have them yet, I mean it, throw whatever is cluttering your home in your closets! You do have to put things away in reasonable time, but you don’t have to get everything put away right away when you are expecting guests soon or even on a particularly demanding day or week. Give some grace to yourself. Our salvation is not works based, so the atmosphere of your home is not either. What do I mean by that? Being anxious about trying to get every single thing done around our home causes our minds to disconnect, from the people in our company (who we are commanded to love) and more importantly from God. It is more important that you’re in a state of mind that can nurture cheerfulness, connection, and praising of The Lord instead of stressing about checking off all the things on your to-do list, that is the virtue of a Proverbs 31 Woman. Read more about this in my Proverbs 31 & Ruth Bible Study Guide here.
  • The above tip, of course, is when you are in a hurry to clean for a out-of-the-norm situation. You do want to get in the habit of putting things away right away. If this is a struggle for you, try identifying just a few things that quickly make your home appear cluttered, thus making you feel overwhelmed. Then, commit yourself to immediately putting those things away when you’re not using them. Typically these are things like putting away your coat as soon as you come home and take it off, toddler toys, and keeping the kitchen sink and dishwashing machine clear. Start with two or three “categories” like the aforementioned and as you get consistent with that add one more category, and so on. Homemaking really is a journey often times and that journey doesn’t always have to be traversed in leaps and bounds!

New Ways To Use An Old Favorite

Non-toxic, super affordable and available just about everywhere, distilled white vinegar has been used for generations for a myriad of purposes. Here are a few of my most used “hacks” for vinegar that are a little out-of-the-box:

• Make your coffee taste better with vinegar! Vinegar is already something you can consume, so why not use it to clean equipment that directly touches what you consume like your coffee maker? Over time, coffee residue builds up in your coffee or K-cup maker and it can cause your morning or midday pick-me-up taste a little stale. HEre’s how to fix that: fill your coffee maker’s water resevoir with white distilled vinegar and run cycles just like you were brewing coffee until the resevoir is empty. If you’re like me and your machine doesn’t operate if it’s empty, just run an extra cycle or two of clean water in the next step. Pour clean water into the resevoir and run it until empty. Recycle the used vinegar in a repurposed spray bottle to clean surfaces with. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how much fresher your coffee tastes!
• Get stubborn grime off of the inside of your microwave by taking a small to medium bowl (microwave safe, of course) and fill it with one part water, one part white distilled vinegar. Power up your microwave for five minutes and DO NOT open the door after the timer’s up. Instead, leave the bowl in the microwave for another five minutes then carefully take the bowl out of the microwave, wipe the inside of your microwave, and be amazed at how easily grease, food residue, etc. comes off. Recycle the vinegar-water mixture for cleaning surfaces or boil and pour down your kitchen or bathroom drain after sprinkling baking soda to clean and deodorize.
• Similarly, you can remove residue from your shower or faucet heads by heavily saturating a dishcloth with white distilled vinegar and wrap it completely around the faucet head or shower head and secure with a rubber band or hair tie. Wait for a couple of hours then remove the cloth, wipe with little effort, and enjoy seeing your faucet or shower head sparkle!
• Disinfect your cutting boards safely (especially great to get deep into porous wood boards) by generously spraying some undiluted, distilled white vinegar onto your cutting board. Let it sit for 15 minutes or so then rinse. After that, if you want to take the natural disinfecting power a little further, sprinkle some salt (coarse or sea salt preferably, but any salt will do) onto the cutting board, slice a lemon in half (great way to use lemons about to go bad so don’t throw them away). Take the halved lemon and “scrub” the cutting board with it. The salt and lemon, like vinegar, is anti-bacterial and has its own components in them to boost the disinfecting power. After you’re done, wipe the board dry with a clean cloth and you have a fresh-smelling, disinfected cutting board without using any chemicals or detergents.

• Deodorizer. Yes, I said it. I personally like the smell of vinegar as long as it’s not on my clothes, but you may think differently. Whether you love the smell or not, you may be wondering, “how in the world can something that smells as strong as vinegar be used to get rid of odors? Vinegar is actually 5-6% acetic acid which is a byproduct of fermentation. That’s how vinegar gets its characteristic odor. Acetic acid breaks down bacteria by binding itself to volatile compounds in the air, absorbs it, and removes them. Pretty neat, huh (can you say homeschool Science opportunity)? Just bring a small pot of white distilled vinegar to a rolling bowl then turn the heat down to simmer for 1 hour. You can alternatively put white distilled vinegar in a bowl in the middle of a room for 30 minutes. Best of all, there is zero waste because you can reuse them for cleaning surfaces — just pour into an empty, repurposed spray bottle to about half full, add either half a lemon (squeezed) or 20 drops of your favorite essential oil, and about a half cup of salt. The salt boosts the vinegar’s bacteria fighting power and is safer than other traditional cleaning “mixers” like baking soda.
  • Side note: Many people will tell you to mix vinegar and baking soda in a bottle for cleaning. I advise against that. Although mixing vinegar and baking soda is not considered dangerous, you should still avoid mixing them and putting them in a container to be closed. Mixing them causes by-products like sodium acetate that are not toxic, but causes the baking soda to foam up and produce carbon dioxide, a potentially dangerous gas that you do not want to breathe in. Plus, if these chemicals are kept in a sealed container for a long time, it can cause a small explosion because the carbon dioxide will try to escape. I will say that if you pour white distilled vinegar and baking soda down an open drain, then pour hot water, to clean and deodorize it is perfectly fine as long as you don’t seal your sink immediately afterwards. I actually do this once a month to our kitchen and bathroom sinks to slow down gunk build up in the pipes, and with a left over lemon that I’ve squeezed for cooking down the drain’s garbage disposal, my sinks smell fresh for days. Just please make sure you don’t put too thick of a slice in there. I’ve made that mistake and broke our garbage disposal which hubby was able to fix easily, but it is still something to avoid!