TIPical Mary Ellen host Mary Ellen Pinkham visits a homeowner and offers tips for cleaning and de-cluttering a home to make way for spring.
- The first step in spring cleaning is to remove any clutter before you begin to clean.
- Next stop: the junk drawer. Toss out things like old candy, old rubber bands, bent paper clips, damaged erasers, loose staples, and casual scraps of paper. Also, grab a piece of scratch paper, and test out all of your markers and pens. Throw out the ones that don't work.
- If you feel like you're being overtaken by books, sort through them. Keep the ones you love, but donate the rest to a school, library, hospital or shelter. There are always places that will take secondhand books.
- If you have a lot of cutout magazine recipes lying around, organize them by placing them into a binder.
- Are you nervous about throwing certain items away? Gather all these items in a box, and store it in the attic or basement for 6 to 8 months. If you haven't used anything in that box by then, get rid of it!
- Go through old clothing. Donate anything that you do not wear to charity.
- Go through your medicine cabinets and remove old prescriptions, half used bottles of lotion and hair conditioners. Also, go through your makeup and remove any lipsticks or eye shadows that you no longer use.
- If you have stacks and stacks of magazines, toss them, or save the articles you really like in a folder or a binder.
- Sort through the mail immediately. To avoid clutter, toss out junk mail right away.
- Keep a laundry basket by the door to hold dry cleaning that needs to be taken in and/or library books that need to be returned.
