And yet, every spring I feel the urge to do spring cleaning. Do I enjoy setting myself up for failure? Don’t I know how this will end—with clean baseboards in only two rooms and new piles of letters or photographs or wrapping paper unearthed to be gone through, maybe, sometime before October?
I need to honor the impulse to sort, pitch, and clean. Clearly, it serves some good purpose or it would not have survived all these years of failure. So I’m taking a different tack this spring. I’m trying to spring clean according to a couple of principles:
Clean where I do the most living. It’s easy to clean out the corners where the stuff piles up but where I hardly spend any time—I can always re-organize a bookshelf. But when the weather is warmer, we spend most of our time on our large back porch. Also, I cook more. Those areas should be clean and clutter-free so that the living we do there will feel less stressful. So porch, pantry, and kitchen are the first priorities. After that, I can spend more time on rooms that are freer to disturb and sort out. And if I don’t get to the sitting room, I can concentrate on it when I do “fall cleaning,” because we spend much of our cold weather there, and that room will be a priority once again.
For every physical sort-and-pitch, I carry out a similar process in an area not so physical or obvious. One of my spring-cleaning lists is of people I need to see in person—friends I haven’t had lunch with in a while, people I keep up with on Facebook but with whom I’d like to share some coffee and face-to-face talk. Other items on the to-do list can be set aside for now, but these relationships are important to me, so I will de-clutter my schedule just as I de-clutter the kitchen.
- What’s your strategy for spring cleaning, if you do it?
- What gets in the way of de-cluttering and refreshing your life?
- What helps you do the sorting and pitching you need?