Spring Cleaning

I don't usually feel the need to do much spring cleaning on the inside of the house. I have a pretty good system that keeps my house clean on a daily basis (click here if you missed it the first time I posted it, and want to know more). The windows and screens, though, always need to be cleaned by the time the weather warms up.

We take the screens down over the winter and store them in the garage. I'm not sure why that seems to be standard in this part of the country. I don't think the snow would damage them. I think it's probably a hold over from a time when people put up storm windows. The only reason we take ours down is because we hang Christmas wreaths on the windows and we have to remove the screens to do it. In any case, they get dirty sitting around in the garage.

The weather was pretty nice on Saturday, so I decided it would be a good time to clean the screens and put them back up. I was planning to wash the windows, too. As it turned out, I got started a little later than I expected and the temperature dropped, so the windows are still in need of cleaning. Our windows tilt in, so all the cleaning can be done from the inside, but it was too cold to keep them open that long. I did wash the screens, though, and I wanted to share the method I used because it worked great and was a lot less labor intensive than my old way.

Normally, I fill a bucket with warm soapy water and scrub the screens with a scrub brush, then rinse them with the hose. We have a lot of windows (and therefore screens), so this takes quite a while and they tend to dry with streaks on them. I also worry about damaging the screens with the scrub brush.

This time I decided to try Scrubbing Bubbles Mega Shower Foamer. I figured if it could clean the shower without scrubbing, it could do the same for the screens. If you've never used it before, it sprays out as a liquid and turns to foam almost immediately on contact. It's perfect because the foam gets into the little holes in the screen and cleans out all the dust and dirt without any scrubbing. I let the foam work for a few minutes and then rinsed it thoroughly with the hose. It worked great and they dried without any streaks. I should mention that we have vinyl screens with metal frames. I would suggest testing it on a small area if you have metal screening material or wood frames. In fact, it's probably a good idea to test it on a small area, regardless, just to be safe.

If you happened to have had a blast of non-spring like weather over the weekend, I apologize. It snowed a little on Sunday night in our neck of the woods. I take full responsibility. Nothing brings back winter faster doing some spring cleaning!