Finish This Simple Cleaning Routine Before You Put Up Holiday Decorations This Year

Everyone has an opinion on when it’s the right time to start decorating for holidays, but the only opinion that matters is your own. In a year that has truly tested your spirit, you deserve to break out the twinkle lights early, if that’s going to bring a spot of joy to your life at home.

Spoiler alert: We’ll be putting up decorations this weekend. (It’s very choose-your-own adventure-style: do as much or as little early decorating as you’d like.) But today, we do the all-important prep work of making sure the spaces you intend to decorate are clean. It’s going to save you from covering yourself and your decorations in dust, and make sure those twinkle lights aren’t spotlights for all your dust bunnies.

Grab your tools and let’s go…

When you’re dusting a room, work from the top down. Taryn started using Libman’s Flexible Microfiber Duster, whose 7′ extension pole reached way up to her overhead beams. It also reached way down to her baseboards—one of those areas you wouldn’t think to dust but will make a huge difference if you do. With the dust gone, she gave her floor a quick once-over with Libman’s Freedom Spray Mop (it works with whatever cleaner you prefer and uses a machine-washable reusable microfiber pad) so the room was ready to sparkle.

You don’t have to dust your home from top to bottom (unless you want to). Today’s mission is a mental spot-clean of the areas you know you usually put decorations. Here are some areas you might like to hit:

• The top of your mantel, console tables, shelves, or any other surface that turns into a holiday vignette for your seasonal display.
• Stairway rails or beams where you hang garlands or strings of lights.
• The area around your Christmas tree or other floor display. You’ll want to dust the walls and clean the floor here. And maybe give the window a wipe-down—the lights illuminate everything.
• Any doors or doorways where you hang wreaths or other decorations.

Walk through your normal decorating M.O. and add any other areas you can think of to your cleaning list today. But it’s ok if you miss a spot and need to clean it later—we’re just trying to think ahead!

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