Now that a lot of us have officially transitioned to a more at-home way of life, this year’s spring cleaning might feel like a larger challenge than years past. But with the right approach, dealing with the clutter and dirt that results from a work-from-home, school-from-home lifestyle can go from overwhelming to easily attainable.
First, give yourself permission to take your time. Remember you’re doing this as a benefit to you and your household, not as a chore or punishment. And when it still feels like too much—which it might (and that’s okay!)—get help with spring cleaning by taking advantage of the best tech and eco-friendly cleaning products available today.
Read on for the ultimate spring cleaning guide on how to get started, how to maintain the cleaning you get done, and how to use tech to your advantage.
Start Here: Declutter and Organize With Smart Furniture
Before you can officially start cleaning, it’s important to first get everything that’s unnecessary out of the way. That means decluttering and organizing each space.
Start small with goals that feel attainable to you. For example, don’t commit to decluttering the whole kitchen today if just the thought of that is overwhelming. Instead, tell yourself you’re only doing kitchen drawers today. Or you’re only doing the pantry today. Baby steps!
The ultimate goal is to stay decluttered and organized once you’re finished going through everything. One of the easiest ways to do that is by making sure everything has a designated place to live.
This can be attainable with most things in a home—you know where clothing, dishes, toys, etc. go—but there are some items that might need extra care, especially if you have children in the house or people coming and going, like guests or maintenance. For those valuable items, smart-locking furniture is a must.
With a piece from Forti Goods smart furniture collection, you can safely store valuables such as:
- Jewelry
- Sentimental items
- Personal pleasure items
- Sensitive documents
- Alcohol
- Prescriptions
- Plant medicines
- Firearms
- Electronics
- Ledgers
- Cash
- Passports
- Collectibles
Using smart furniture for secure storage helps with spring cleaning in a couple of ways. First, you have a safe place to keep your valuables in an easy-to-reach location, so you can actually enjoy your valuables when you want or need to, as opposed to having to dig them out of their “hiding place” (that everyone in the house probably knows about). Second, you also have a place to store other things. Each Forti Goods piece comes with one smart-locking compartment, but there are other areas that can still be utilized for storage, creating more places for items in your home to live. And if you need more lockable storage, you can always add another smart lock to your piece.
Apart from offering extra storage to keep clutter at bay, smart-locking furniture also adds a level of safety to your home. The Forti Goods app gives you control over who can open your locked compartment and when, so you can keep curious hands out of your smart furniture but still be able to grant access if/when you’d like.
Next: Deep Clean With Eco-Friendly Cleaners That Actually Work
Using eco-friendly cleaners is better for your family’s health, the health of your home and furnishings, and the health of the planet.
Many common household cleaners contain harmful chemicals that are categorized as “volatile organic compounds,” or VOCs, like ammonia, phosphorus, and nitrogen. Not only can they be harmful to breathe, but they can also contribute to nutrient-loading in water when they’re washed down the drain. This, in turn, can negatively affect vegetation and wildlife.[1] Not to mention, the single-use plastic packaging of most household cleaners adds to our already overflowing landfills.
Instead, opt for eco-friendly cleaners like Supernatural, one of our favorite brands. Their cleaning products are made with natural, non-toxic ingredients and eco-friendly essential oils from plants like palmarosa, basil, Siberian fir, and eucalyptus. Their Cleaning Starter Kit should cover most of your cleaning needs as it comes with cleaner for glass and mirrors, counters and granite, wood and floors, and bath and tile, as well as four reusable glass bottles.
In our opinion, spring cleaning with eco-friendly cleaners is ultimately more effective because you’re not replacing dust with something else you don’t want to breathe in—VOCs. Plus, you’re not adding more trash to landfills.
Finish: Maintain Your Clean Home With Helpful Technology
Cleaning your house is one thing. Maintaining that cleanliness is another. Fortunately, technology can help.
Use the calendar or reminder app on your phone to set alerts for repeating tasks that’ll help keep your home tidy in between big cleanings. Some ideas of reminders to set include:
- Changing your home air filter(s)
- Cleaning the gutters
- Shampooing sofas, chairs, rugs, etc.
- Regularly addressing piles like mail, shoes by the door, etc.
- Vacuuming/mopping floors
Fortunately, technology can actuallydo that last task of vacuuming/mopping for you—meet the Narwal T10.
This robot 2-in-1 mop and vacuum can help with spring cleaning in a more powerful and effective way than any other robot vacuum we’ve tried. The biggest draw for us was the robot mop feature, but what ended up standing out the most after we tried it was its self-cleaning feature. The Narwal T10 can sense when its mop is dirty, directing itself back to its base for a deep clean. All you have to do is make sure its clean water tank is full.
On top of that, it can also help with spring cleaning through its:
- HEPA 10 filter and strong 1800pa suction (with no roll brushes, so there’s no tangled hair to deal with)
- Smart mapping and navigation that learns the layout of your home and allows you to set no-go zones
- Child lock that keeps it at its base so your kids and/or pets can’t mess with it
Getting Started With Spring Cleaning
With eco-friendly cleaners, a robot vacuum/mop to handle your floors, and smart furniture to store valuables and other items, spring cleaning doesn’t have to be an unattainable goal or a painful chore that drags on for months. By taking advantage of the cleaning and storage tools that are out there, and by taking baby steps, you can easily prep your home for the upcoming months of heavier foot traffic and wide-open doors and windows.
And once you’ve knocked out your spring cleaning, you might even feel inspired to change up the aesthetic in a room or two. If a brand new piece of smart-locking furniture doesn’t completely scratch that itch, check out these ideas on how to redesign your space.
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