One Way to Flip the Script on Your Spring Cleaning — And Get a Deeper Clean than Ever
Apartment Therapy’s Spring Cleaning Cure is a free 20-day cleaning plan that helps you tackle the most common spring cleaning tasks to give your home its deepest clean yet. Sign up now to get all 20 lessons in your inbox.
Most spring cleaning checklists will have you focus only on the “what”: Clean the sink, then the backsplash, then the oven. And that’s all fine and good (in fact, those are the tasks we completed on the first three days of our Spring Cleaning Cure). But when your goal is getting a really deep clean, I think you need to flip the script.
When it’s time to spring clean, instead of focusing only on “what” to clean, spend some time thinking about the “how,” too.
Think about it: You clean your kitchen all the time. It’s the tools and the technique that make a deep clean deep.
For this 20-day spring cleaning plan, I didn’t just put objects and areas on the to-do list. I also added a few days where we center on a specific technique, and apply that technique to as many places in that room as we can.
It will all make perfect sense once we dive in…
Day 4: Soak or scrub the details in the kitchen.
The details in your kitchen — like the stove knobs and the sponge holder — usually get cleaned in place as you’re cleaning the rest of the room. But the fact that they’re unfixed means you can get an even deeper clean when you need to. (Yes, your stove knobs probably pop right off — try giving them a tug.)
For today’s assignment, fill up your sink or bathtub or a big bin with soapy water (one squirt of dish soap goes a long way). Then grab whatever you can remove from the kitchen and drop it in your wash water. Here are few things to look for:
- Stove knobs
- Oven grates
- Vent hood screens
- The drip tray from your fridge’s water dispenser, or the coffee machine
- Countertop accessories, like your sponge holder, utensil crock, or soap dispenser — but not anything made of wood
Wrangle these things up, toss them in your soap bath, then leave them to soak for 10 to 15 minutes.
When time is up, pull your things out of the wash water one by one to inspect them. Some things will be super clean and just require a rinse; others might need some help from a scrubby sponge or cleaning brush to look good-as-new. Give each of your kitchen details the love it needs, then dry each one and put it back into place.
Soaking really does a lot of the work for you. As long as whatever you’re cleaning is water-safe, a long soak can dissolve stuck-on food or grime from many of the small details in your kitchen.
More ways to participate in the Spring Cleaning Cure:
- Sign up for email updates
- Visit the 2021 Spring Cleaning Cure page and catch up on assignments
- Save or print your own Spring Cleaning Cure tips workbook
- Download the Spring Cleaning Cure calendar
- Join the Apartment Therapy Cure Facebook group
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