Spring is in the air. Birdsare chirping, flowers are blooming and the Giants are at Spring Training in Arizona. Now that we’ve all given up on our New Year’s resolutions, or at least postponed them until after Easter, it’s time to think about Spring Cleaning: That traditional time of year when we plan a major clean up of our house, yard and the garage. This is no easy chore (or collection of chores). It takes preparation, conditioning and training. Back when I was a kid, my parents took great pleasure in participating in our annual springtime neighborhood beautification project. I can still remember my mother’s Spring Cleaning slogan of 1973, “Clean it and I mean it” or her 1979 catch phrase, “If it don’t fit, it ain’t legit” which I’m pretty sure was stolen by Johnny Cochran for his OJ defense years later. My all-time favorite was 1985’s “My louse of a spouse better clean this damn house.” I think my mom was mad at my dad that year. In most households, spring-cleaning still remains a necessary evil and the month of March is when most families begin to tackle this ritualistic effort.
The House
In these days, where everyone needs the newest, fastest and coolest of everything; where nothing is built to last but everything is recyclable, a lot of us accumulate an excessive amount of junk around the house. Growing up, my parents insisted that during “S-C Week,” we would pack up our home like we were moving across country. This fun little task allowed us to throw-out, clean-up and organize the contents of our 1,800 square foot house after 11.75 months of hoarding, storing and ignoring the place. It was amazing what we would find around the house as we emptied out closets, rearranged furniture and unloaded cabinets and cupboards.Sadly, anything from a Santa suit to old Halloween candy to a petrified missing pet could potentially be uncovered.
Discoveries like these would inevitably bring up a few interesting questions, such as: Why did Santa leave his suit at our house, who’s the chocoholic hoarding Kit Kat bars and why did the hamster commit suicide? Room by room, the Copeland Clan would ascend on our targeted living space assignment with one goal: To beautificate the premises.
As parents, the term clean-up may be too simplistic a term when it comes to the thought of tackling the hard-hat excavation of our kid’s bedrooms and closets. I am always amazed at the amount of “stuff” kids of today can accumulate.
My daughters’ rooms often resemble a stinky secondhand thrift store! I like to think of Spring Cleaning the kid’s bedrooms as the great discard of accumulated, worthless junk; a purging of broken and obsolete electronics, and the general discarding of non-fitting or out-of-style clothing.
If memory serves me correctly, I didn’t have one tenth of the stuff my kids have lying around the house. I owned one pair of sneakers, not what seems like hundreds of running shoes, flip-flops, boots, slippers, flats and heels. Not that I wanted a pair of heels. I wasn’t a young Bruce Jenner.
The Yard
My landscape isn’t in any better shape than the house. Despite a lack of rain, I have weeds in my lawn, weeds in my shrubs, weeds in my rock beds and weeds in the cracks of my concrete/driveway. Even my beautiful, stone BBQ island has weeds. Not to mention, every plant-like green thing outside of my house is overgrown to the point that my backyard looks like the Amazon Rainforest or a Rainforest Café.
Back in the day, my Dad would rally his pre-pubescent children around him on a Saturday morning and begin by having us spray the yard with the strongest pre and post emergent chemicals sold (illegally) at black market flea markets. Once that was complete, he would give us access to the sharpest machete-type gardening tools in the shed for a hardy afternoon of pruning, trimming and weeding. Finally, after a refreshing ten-minute lunch break, he would point us in the direction of the riding mower.
But hey, except for an occasional tick or tremor, I turned out OK. Now those pesky OSHA restrictions and child labor laws limit our kids to raking leaves and using the hose. I can’t even get the little buggers to clean up the dog poop. If it weren’t against the HOA CC&Rs, this would be the perfect time of year to shape my agapanthus shrubs into the shape of various zoo animals. Truth be told, my yard just needs some mulch, a few flowers and a synthetic lawn to keep my neighbors from shaking their heads in disgust as they drive by the house and refuse to wave.
The Garage
The garage is the biggest and most difficult of the three Spring Cleaning Triathlon events. It will take strength, endurance and steroids (use them if you’ve got them) to get the wife’s car back into its rightful spot. It is not uncommon to fill every square inch of my garage each year, much like a hoarder’s self-storage unit in Richmond. Last spring, I found my next-door neighbor’s ping-pong table, keg-er-ator and his mother-in-law living in my garage. I have no idea how any of those things got there, but I did return his ping-pong table and mother-in-law.
A proper garage Spring Cleaning can consume an entire weekend. First thing Saturday morning, I slip into my Haz-mat suit and Chuck Taylor high tops and begin removing every last item from the garage and placing it in alphabetical order on the front lawn and driveway. Just kidding, I just throw shi.. uh.. stuff anywhere. Once the garage is swept, power washed and deloused, there’s the job of storing everything to an orderly place, less the 70% of previous inventory that gets trashed, hauled, donated or sold at Sunday’s big Copeland Family White Trash Garage Sale. There will be price slashing specials all day long. If all goes we’ll, I can usually park the little woman’s car back in the garage for about a week or two before we start accumulating new junk and the garage becomes overrun again.
It’s been said that our home is our castle! Spring-cleaning is a great opportunity to spruce up the kingdom. For most of us, our house is our single largest investment and a little curb appeal wouldn’t hurt the value. There’s no denying that a cleaning triathlon is a lot of work, but the results will be rewarding and assuredly worth the effort. If you can get the kids creatively involved you’ll kill two birds with one stone. (I actually found two dead birds in my hall closet last year.)
Granted, I’ve already trademarked the term, The Spring Clean Triathlon, but for a small fee I would be happy to send you a Spring Cleaning kit to get you started. We even have Spring Clean2015 t-shirts in assorted colors and sizes. Think of the slogan possibilities, “Keep it Alive in 2-0-1-5, “Rad Dad and The #1 Clean Team,” or more to the point, “Damn Right I’m Mean – Now Quit Whining and Clean.”
My mom would be so proud.
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