For my final project in Spring Cleaning Week…this.
Whyyyyyy is it so hard to keep your garage clean? Every few months, I decide that I’ve had it with the state of our garage (cluttered! dusty! inexplicably scattered with Cheerios!) and spend an hour or two attacking it…but within a couple of weeks, like clockwork, it returns to its resting state (disastrous).
The thing about our garage is that it’s such an opportunity. It’s fairly well-lit and relatively empty thanks to the fact that we live in California and don’t have to actually park our cars in it. And given the not-so-massive size of our house, it’d be so nice to have a little extra space for Kendrick to set up his instruments; for the kids to play; for me to exercise (hahahahahaha); for whatever.
And so I put it on the calendar: Garage Cleaning Day. Not only were we going to reorganize; we were going to CLEAN THE BEAST. This process, of course, involved harrowing close encounters with dustballs that very closely resembled (and that I remain certain may have been) black widows.
A Handful Of Newly-Acquired Garage-Cleaning Tips
This may sound obvious – but it isn’t something I’ve personally thought of before, and turned out to be what made the biggest difference. Approach one side at a time. Move everything over to one side of the garage (throwing out the stuff you don’t want as you go), clean the now-emptied space, and then repeat the process on the other side. Bam.
- Get as much as possible up off the floor, onto walls and the ceiling. You can pick up fancy wall-organization contraptions, but good old nails work well too (just make sure to use mollies if you’re hammering them into drywall).
- Plastic shoe holders are great for organizing smaller items like cleaning supplies, garden tools, and sports equipment.
- To disinfect hard non-porous surfaces, try Clorox® Disinfecting Wipes with MicroScrubbers (they even work on sealed wood floors) or a multi-purpose cleaner like Clorox® Clean-Up Cleaner + Bleach or Clorox® Scentiva Multi-Surface Cleaner (which smells ahhhh-mazing, by the way).
- To deep-clean the floor, start by sweeping up any debris, and pre-washing, then mop the area with a solution of ½ cup of Clorox® Regular-Bleach per gallon of water. Allow solution to sit on surface for at least 5 minutes, then rinse well and air dry. (Tip: Place a portable floor fan at the end of the room to dry the floor in only a few minutes, before kids or pets have time to walk on it.)
- Wear plastic gloves, because ew garages can be so gross. (And if you have mice, make sure to wear a mask while cleaning, as rodents can carry a pulmonary disease called hantavirus.)
Finally, when doing your big spring clean (both in the garage and elsewhere in your house), remember to follow Ye Olde Rules Of Tidying Up. Basically, get rid of everything you can. Remember: Our lives are filled with things that have already done for us what they were intended to do…and by keeping them around, all we’re doing is obscuring our view of what we really do love and need.
Happy Spring! Go forth and clean.
For more spring cleaning tips, trick and life hacks, visit SeasonOfClean.com.
This post was created in collaboration with Clorox.
