Winter Cleaning Tips that Will Brighten Your Home

Most of us leave our deep household cleaning for the spring, when we burst into a flurry of energy known as "Spring Cleaning." Spring cleaning usually means cleaning, dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing every nook and cranny so that our homes sparkle.

While deep cleaning in the spring is certainly a great goal, our homes also can stand a little "spring cleaning" in the dead of winter. It's in the gloomy winter when our homes can really benefit from a little sparkle and shine. Here are five winter cleaning tips to get you started:

1. Strip and wax the kitchen floor. Winters are tough on a kitchen floor with kids constantly traipsing through with mud and snow on their boots. After the holidays is also a good time to strip the kitchen floor of old wax then apply three coats of new wax. Your floor will look brighter and lighter.

2. Wash inside windows. Fireplace and candle soot can coat the windows with a dingy film that can block the sun. To bring sparkle back to the windows, wash the interior panes with an ammonia based window cleaner and polish dry with a soft rag.

3. Polish the furniture. Polishing furniture means more than just knocking off the dust. A good furniture polish will revitalize your furniture and leave a nice shine behind. Shiny furniture can also help to bounce ambient light around a dark room, which is a real plus during the winter.

4. Shine up ceiling light fixtures and bulbs. Light fixtures and bulbs collect dust ~ even during the winter ~ that can mute their brightness. To bring back the light in your home, take down the glass ceiling fixtures and wash them in soapy water. This is also a good time to vacuum the cloth lamps shades and give all the light bulbs a good dusting.

5. Scrub down the kitchen ceiling. With all that holiday cooking, kitchen ceilings will turn dingy without us even realizing that it's happening. Washing the kitchen ceiling not only lightens it by a couple of shades, but it will also reflect winter sunlight which can brighten up the room. To clean my kitchen ceilings, I will combine a cup of ammonia, 1/2 tsp of Dawn liquid detergent and a gallon of hot water for a degreasing solution that works wonders.