A spring cleaning checklist for Australian homes

A spring cleaning checklist written for the northern hemisphere is about opening a house that has been sealed against snow.

Ours has two jobs instead. Clear out what a wet, closed-up winter left behind, and prepare the house for four months of heat, dust and pollen.

That ordering matters. Deal with the damp first, because heat turns a small mould problem into a permanent stain, and it does it quickly.

Pick the first genuinely dry, breezy day for the whole exercise. Everything below works better with the windows open and the air moving.

Winter condensation collects in the same places every year, and none of them are places anybody looks.

• Window seals and reveals, especially on the southern side of the house.

• Wardrobe corners and the backs of built-ins on external walls.

• Behind bedheads, where a mattress sits against cold plaster.

• Bathroom ceilings and the silicone around the shower base.

• Under sinks, where a slow leak has had all winter to be ignored.

Surface mould wipes off with a diluted bleach solution or a dedicated product. Mould that has grown into old silicone will not come out, and the honest fix is resealing.

This is the half of the spring cleaning checklist that decides how the house feels in January.

Wash curtains and blinds, vacuum mattresses, and clean the flyscreens before the first hot week rather than during it.

Change or wash the air conditioner filters now. Every technician in the city is booked out the week the first heatwave arrives, and a blocked filter is what makes a unit fail then.

Ceiling fans need doing before they are switched on, not after. A season of dust on the blades ends up distributed through the room at speed.

Spring is when the kitchen catches up on a winter of roasting and slow cooking.

Oven inside and out, including the door glass and the racks. Rangehood filter soaked rather than wiped, which is the single most skipped item in the house.

Pantry emptied and checked for anything past date, and the shelves wiped. Warmer weather is when a forgotten packet becomes a pantry moth problem.

Fridge coils vacuumed at the back, seals wiped, and the freezer defrosted if it needs it. All three make a fridge work less hard through summer.

Dust mite populations peak in the humidity that follows winter, which makes this the right month for the soft parts of the house.

Wash pillows and quilts, not just covers. Most are machine washable and almost nobody does it.

Vacuum mattresses on both sides and rotate them. Vacuum upholstered bedheads and the sides of the base while the bed is moved out.

Swap winter bedding out and store it clean and dry. Linen put away damp comes out smelling of the cupboard it spent summer in.

This is the part of the spring cleaning checklist most people skip, and it covers the areas that get used most over summer.

Clear the gutters and downpipes. In bushfire-prone areas this is a safety job rather than a maintenance one, and it has a deadline.

Hose down outdoor furniture and cushions, sweep the balcony or porch, and wash down the barbecue including the grease tray.

Clean the flyscreen doors and check the seals on them. It is the difference between an open house and a house full of insects in December.

A few tasks only make sense annually, and spring is when they are easiest.

Booking these as one deep clean is usually cheaper than a weekend of hire equipment, and it happens in a day rather than over a month of intentions.

Bathrooms carry more of winter than any other room, because they spent three months warm, wet and closed.

Start with the exhaust fan. Take the cover off, wash it, and vacuum the housing. A blocked fan is the reason a bathroom never dries, and almost nobody has ever cleaned one.

Then the grout and the silicone. Grout cleans with a dedicated product and a brush; silicone that has darkened all the way through does not, and resealing is the answer.

Check the shower screen seal and the base of the door frame while you are there. Both fail quietly and both cause damage that is not a cleaning problem by the time it is visible.

Finish with the drains. A slow drain in October is a blocked one in January, and the difference is one bottle of enzyme cleaner.

The single most effective item on any spring clean or deep clean is free, and it is airflow.

Open opposite sides of the house on a breezy day and let it run for a few hours. Cross-ventilation shifts months of stale air in a way a single open window never does.

Open wardrobes, cupboards and the linen press at the same time. Those are the spaces that hold the winter smell, and they are always closed when the windows are open.

Pull the beds off the walls for the afternoon. It is the one part of the house that never sees moving air, and it is where condensation collects.

Nothing on this list works on a surface that is covered, and cleaning around objects you are about to remove is wasted effort.

Work one room at a time with three piles: keep, donate, discard. Rooms rather than categories, because a whole-house sort is how a spring clean turns into a fortnight.

Book the council hard rubbish collection before you start rather than after. It sets a deadline, which is most of what makes decluttering finish.

Then clean the room properly once it is empty of what was leaving. It is faster in that order and it stays done longer.

The whole list is realistically two full days for two people in an average house, and that assumes the decluttering happened first.

Work top to bottom and dry to wet, and start anything that needs time before anything that needs effort. A plan that fits on one page looks like this.

SATURDAY
08:00  Oven treatment on. Rangehood filter in to soak.
08:15  Open the house. Every window, every wardrobe.
08:30  First load: curtains from the main rooms.
09:00  High dusting throughout — fittings, cornices, fans.
10:30  Bathrooms. Exhaust fan covers off first.
12:30  Break. Rehang the curtains while they are damp.
13:30  Kitchen: cupboards, pantry, fridge, then the oven.
16:00  Floors, edges first. Finish and stop.

SUNDAY
08:00  Bedrooms: mattresses, pillows, wardrobe corners.
10:00  Windows, tracks and flyscreens.
12:30  Break.
13:30  Outdoors: gutters, furniture, barbecue, balcony.
15:30  Final pass on floors. Done.

The order is not arbitrary. Curtains go in early because they need a full dry, and the oven is treated before breakfast because it needs hours. Floors are last on both days, because everything above them sheds.

And be realistic. Half a spring cleaning checklist done properly beats all of it done in a rush, and the outdoor half can wait a week without any cost.

The annual jobs are the ones worth paying for, because they need equipment and time rather than knowledge.

Carpets, windows, the oven, and the high dusting between them account for most of the effort and almost none of the satisfaction.

A booked visit also has a date, which is the one thing a spring cleaning checklist on the fridge does not.

Whichever way you do it, finish before the first hot week. Everything on this list is harder at thirty-five degrees, and most of it is what makes that week bearable.