As winter ends and spring begins, hope and renewal fill the air. To make your spring cleaning efficient and effective, we turned to local experts to cut through the clutter (pun intended!) of advice filling our feeds.
Starting inside
Nicole Fortson and Sarah Sullivan, The Tweaked Home co-owners, suggest using spring to give your house a fresh look – and it’s easier than you think. “Moving a vase from one room to the next can make it look completely different,” Fortson says. “Use what you have and bring a fresh perspective.” They recommend stripping away all surface items and putting them in one pile to view. “Ask yourself, ‘Would I purchase this?’ If the answer is no, put it aside and you will be left only with things you love,” says Sullivan.
Nicole and Sarah’s pick: “After the dark and gray winter, we love plants to make it feel fresh and alive. Tulips or forsythia from our yard help bring spring inside. Pothos is a personal favorite, it grows beautifully in most conditions and is very forgiving.”
Gearing up the garage
After a long and messy winter, the number one place to spring clean is the garage. “The garage is very exciting,” says Kathleen O’Connor, co-owner of House 2 Home Organizing. “It’s one of the best areas to store items that don’t need to take up valuable real estate and clutter your house.” A core mistake is spending a lot of money buying organizing products, but not taking the time first to sort and purge. “It is time consuming, but necessary,” says O’Connor.
Kathleen’s pick: “Nothing says ‘spring is here’ to me more than my garage ‘winter-summer swap.’ Getting the snow blower, snow gear, and holiday decorations out of sight and replacing them with patio cushions, summer toys, and garden tools is one of my biggest joys! I take inventory of what we have, what we need, and what we can donate.”
Cleaning the energy
Melanie Norman is a Feng Shui practitioner who owns Red Dragon Consulting Group in Wilton. With a background in Chinese medicine, her spring cleaning focuses on clearing out the old energy (called qi) to help the renewing qi flow. “Spring signifies a fresh start, and that is why deep cleaning is so important,” says Noman, who suggests clearing clutter from the four most important areas of your home: around the door you mainly go in and out, your bedroom, your office, and your stove. Melanie’s pick: “My favorite cleaning tool is a broom – to get places the vacuum cleaner can’t! I also love diffusing essential oils. Eucalyptus is wonderful for our breathing; rosemary is perfect for the kitchen; and rose adds a romantic scent to the bedroom.”
Stepping outside
When it comes to spring cleaning outside your house, Young’s Fencing and Landscaping garden expert and sales manager Anne Uecker recommends using March to remove debris and dethatch, and April to aerate your lawn and put down lime and grass seed. “Spring is my favorite time of year,” says Uecker. “I can’t wait to get outside and start turning over the soil in my gardens.” Uecker says it’s best to wait until Mother’s Day to plant flowers, limiting the potential for frost.
Anne’s pick: “My favorite spring plants are definitely daffodils. They are happy little signs of warmer days to spend outside in the garden. Adding compost to all my vegetable and flower beds always gives them a boost, and I follow up with mulch in June to keep the weeds at bay.” •
