A Spring Cleaning Checklist for a New England House

Spring cleaning in New England is really heating season cleanup. Six months of a closed house with forced air or radiators running leaves a specific and predictable mess, and the reason to do it in spring is not tradition. It is that you can finally open the windows.

Do it in this order

Top to bottom, dry before wet, and one room finished before the next one starts. The most common mistake is doing all the floors first and then knocking dust onto them for two days.

1. Air the house out

Before anything. Open windows on opposite sides for twenty minutes and let it cross ventilate. Six months of closed air is most of why a house smells like winter, and no amount of cleaning fixes it while the windows are shut.

2. The heating system's leftovers

This is the part that is genuinely regional and the part most checklists skip.

• Forced hot air: vacuum every supply and return vent cover, take the covers off and do the inside of the boot, and change the filter. A whole winter of circulation has moved a lot through those.
• Radiators: vacuum between the fins with a crevice tool, then wipe. The dust that bakes on a radiator all winter is the smell people associate with turning the heat on in November.
• Wood stove or fireplace: ash out, hearth done, and the wall above it wiped, which almost always has a film.
• Ceiling fans: the top edges of the blades, then reverse the direction for summer.

3. Windows, sills, and tracks

The big one, and near the water it is the biggest. Salt film builds all winter on coastal glass and it does not wipe like dirt. Do the interior glass, then the sills, then vacuum the tracks with a crevice tool before you wipe them, because wiping a sandy track first just makes mud.

Storm windows and screens come next. Wash screens with a brush and rinse them outside, and let them dry fully before they go back in, because a damp screen in a frame is how you get mildew on the frame.

4. Every room, high to low

• Ceiling corners and light fixtures, including the bugs in the bowls.
• Door frames and the top edges of doors.
• Walls wiped around switches and door handles, which is where hand marks live.
• Baseboards wiped rather than dusted.
• Behind and under furniture that gets cleaned around all year.
• Under the beds, and the bed frame itself.
• Closet floors and shelves.

5. Kitchen

• Inside the oven and the door glass.
• Range hood filter out and through the dishwasher.
• Refrigerator inside, then pull it out for the coils and the floor behind.
• Dishwasher filter, which is the reason glassware comes out cloudy.
• Inside cabinets, and the tops of the uppers.
• Under the sink, checking for the ring that means a slow leak.

6. Bathrooms

• Exhaust fan covers off and washed. A clogged cover means the fan is moving almost nothing, which is most of why a bathroom stays damp.
• Grout, with dwell time.
• Shower door tracks.
• Behind and around the base of the toilet.

7. The pollen problem

Worth planning around. Oak and pine pollen here peaks roughly late April into May, and it will undo your window work in a week if you do windows too early. Do the interior deep work in April and save exterior glass and screens until pollen drops off, usually by the first week of June.

8. Old house specifics

If you are in a Federal or Victorian era house, which describes a lot of Newburyport, Salem, and Amesbury, add these: deep window sash channels, the gaps between wide plank floorboards, and the back edge of every stair tread. All three hold grit that a modern house does not have anywhere to keep.

What to hand off

The reach work is the part that eats a weekend: baseboards, inside the oven, window tracks, behind appliances, grout. That is exactly what a deep clean is, and it is $389 for most two bedroom, two bathroom homes. Do the tidying and the decluttering yourself, because nobody else can, and hand off the parts that are just hours.

Get a number for your house from the price tool, or see the full deep clean list on the cleaning page.