Spring Cleaning Furniture, Appliances & the Forgotten

Allison Weeks
May 10
6 min read

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Cleaning Furniture

Hopefully, you have a regular system for cleaning your furniture that involves dusting and or polishing your wood furniture and vacuuming/spot cleaning your upholstered furniture. Think about your seasonal cleaning of these items as just a little bit extra. Maybe you typically only dust the top of the coffee table….great, now to be a little extra with this job, dust EVERYTHING…remove everything from the coffee table (on top, underneath, in the cubbies or drawers) and thoroughly dust or if necessary, clean, those surfaces. Before you put stuff back, do a little purging and return what you are keeping in a neat, organized way. If you notice something broken, scratched, or with chipping paint, either make a note to come back to it and fix on a specific date or, ideally, take care of the repair right away.

Bookshelves, same thing. Take everything off and wipe down all the surfaces of the bookshelf. Assess for repairs, purge and return items. Real wood furniture should be dry dusted every week or so with a Swifer, feather duster or microfiber cloth, and conditioned once or twice per year with lemon oil, beeswax or other natural conditioner. Remember, wood furniture is porous and it gets thirsty, so you want to condition it twice a year so it doesn’t dry out and crack.

Now, about those chairs and couches. As we’ve already discussed, winter breeds dust and dirt all over the home from heating sources and tightly closed windows. Summer can also bring more dirt into the house as kids and pets play outside, but it also brings more sweat and body oils-yummy. So a good pass with the vacuum hose over your upholstery in spring will get rid of winter dust and spring pollen. Depending on how much you and your people perspire during the warm months, you may need to steam clean upholstery after vacuuming in the fall. Slip covers are easy peasy…just remove and throw them in the wash. Most experts recommend, however, that you do not put them in the dryer due to shrinking risk. Just hang or dry flat.

Leather furniture should be dusted or wiped down with slightly damp cloth regularly and vacuumed with soft brush attachment regularly. To keep it soft and prevent cracks, condition leather once or twice a year with the conditioner appropriate to type of leather. Make sure you clean under the cushions of your couches and chairs, we’ll talk more about that shortly.

Appliances

In Monday Motivation #18, I discuss cleaning common large and small appliances. But here’s a little bit more information on this topic.

Washer and Dryer

These do a lot of work for you, so take good care of them. Regularly wipe down seals, gaskets, filters, detergent trays and the high touch areas of the washer and dryer. About once per quarter deep clean the drum of your washer by using special washing machine cleaner and running the "clean tub" cycle. Wipe down all outer surfaces to removed spilled laundry soap and dust.

For the dryer, at least twice a year, clean the lint trap screen with warm soapy water to remove residue from fabric softener sheets and then clean out your dryer vent to prevent fire. My husband and I recently did this and it was easy and so satisfying to see all of that dryer lint come flying out of hose vent on the side of the house. You can buy a dryer duct cleaning tool for less than $20 that attaches to a regular household electric drill. It’s a long thin tube that extends up to 30 feet or more and has a round brush, similar to a toilet brush, on the end. It’s very easy to do and works really well. I will link a video in the show notes as well as the tool we used.

For the Dishwasher, refrigerator, oven and stove top I do go into a lot of detail for weekly, monthly, and seasonal cleaning, on MM18, so give that a listen.

Be sure to give all of your small appliances some extra seasonal TLC as well. Consider things that might need to be descaled and/or disinfected like coffee makers, kettles, ice makers and humidifiers.

There are a few other large appliances in the home that need special seasonal attention, but probably from a professional. As part of your spring cleaning checklist, make sure you schedule seasonal maintenance on your air conditioner, your boiler or furnace, water heater, septic tank, and plumbing systems.

The Forgotten

Seasonal cleaning provides an excellent opportunity to give some attention to areas of the home we often forget need to be cleaned every once in a while. The Forgotten, falls into two groups—out of sight, out of mind and familiarity blindness. The first is exactly what the name implies—spots we hardly ever see so we forget they need to be cleaned. The second consists of everyday items that are so much a part of the environment, we don’t even notice they are there, much less that they need cleaning.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

When you are going to tackle the first group, remember 3 phrases:

On Top
Underneath
Behind

Think about the tops of things they haven’t seen a dust rag in a while. Get out your sturdy step ladder and check places like the top of door & window frames, the top of cabinets and tall furniture (ie, china cabinet or wardrobe), the top of taller appliances-specifically the refrigerator, tops of books and other items on a shelf, and the tops of picture frames hanging on the wall.

Next, go in the other direction. Get floor level and clean all of the “underneath” places; under the bed, under the washer and dryer, the fridge, the oven, etc. When it comes to cleaning under appliances, you really need to pull them away from the wall so you can get to the floor to sweep, mop & vacuum as needed…we’ll talk more about that in a minute.

Pull up the couch and chair cushions and vacuum under them thoroughly…you might even find some treasure under there. Under chairs and barstools, specifically the rungs and legs, can get really dusty and the bottom of chair legs collect all kinds of dust bunnies and hair, so be sure to clean those off.

And finally, the out of sight out of mind places behind things should be addressed at least once a year. Bigger furniture pieces like the couch should be pulled away from the wall so you can vacuum the back of the couch and the floor behind it. If you can, pull your larger appliances away from the wall so you can clean the floor—which is that underneath part I just talked about- but also the back of the appliance.

For example, the back of a dryer can get really dusty with lint, and the coils on the back of a refrigerator should be vacuumed with a soft brush attachment once a year to keep it cooling efficiently. And while you have it out, you can clean the sides of the appliance where food or laundry soap might have dripped, and the walls and baseboards behind the appliance that you normally can’t get to.

Familiarity Blindness

This group includes things like garbage cans and recycle bins. Your kitchen garbage can should be cleaned at least once a month. You can either spray and wipe with all purpose disinfectant or take it outside and hose it down. Your choice. Same goes for bathroom garbage cans and diaper pails.

Other garbage cans in the house, probably only need attention a couple times a year if you always use a liner of some sort. And don’t forget the outside garbage cans. Cleaning those out a couple times per year will reduce odors and prevent attracting unwanted pests of both the insect and animal variety. Nothing says welcome to a hungry raccoon like smelly garbage cans. Ask me how I know this.

In the bathroom, don’t forget to clean your shower head, especially if you have hard water. You can descale a clogged shower head by putting a descaling solution like CLR in a plastic bag and attaching that bag to the shower with a rubber band around the neck so that the head is submerged in the solution at the bottom of the bag. Let it soak for a couple of hours, remove the bag and run the shower on hot for a few minutes. No more clogs.

Do you have faux plants and or faux flowers? Those can collect some serious dust! Take them outside and give them a good shake or blow the dust off with a leaf blower.

Throughout the house, you should give cabinet fronts, along with nobs and pulls, a good wipe down once or twice a year, more often in the kitchen and bathroom.

When’s the last time you cleaned the floor of your closets and pantry? During seasonal cleaning is a great time to move everything off the floor and vacuum up those dust bunnies hiding in the corners. While you are in there, check the top of the shelves in the closet.

So there you have it; seasonal cleaning for furniture, appliances and the forgotten. I hope you feel motivated to give these areas some special attention during your spring or seasonal cleaning.