Gimmicks for Cleaning

Although spring cleaning historically involved removing soot produced by wood stoves and oil furnaces from one’s house, the ritual seems more instinctual to me. Is it because spring is a time of renewal and new beginnings? Or is it just easier to clean when it’s warm enough, in cooler climates, to open up the doors and windows?

I’m in the middle of moving cross-country, from Los Angeles back to New York, so I’m engaging in the ultimate act of cleaning: getting rid of everything. There are wedding presents I can’t look at anymore that are going to the Salvation Army. My friends are taking my favorite plants, which I have nurtured and pruned and fertilized for years. The process is also giving me a great excuse to change from my mid-century modern aesthetic to more of a New York sensibility (I’m calling it English-West Indian-Ikea-Tribal-Chinoiserie-Craigslist).

Normally, I don’t have such a great incentive to clean and throw things away, and I usually have to resort to gimmicks and crutches in order to begin the process. When I was a kid, I was the gimmick. My two older sisters would call me into the room they shared and say “Let’s play robot!” They’d pretend to wind me up, then lie on their twin beds and smirk as, piece by piece, they instructed me to pick up and put away everything in their room. Sometimes, they would set the kitchen timer to fifteen minutes and see if I could get it clean by then. As shameful as this was, it did teach me a great gimmick I still use: let’s call it “Now-or-Never.” I look at the clock and say, okay, I’m cleaning for an hour (or ten minutes, or thirty … whatever I have). And whatever is still dirty, stays dirty. It works—and the best thing is that when you’re done, you’re done.

Another great gimmick is pot. Although I’ve never been a pot smoker (I tried, but I ended up hiding in the bathroom and eating crackers), I have more than one friend who gets high to clean the house, top to bottom. My brother-in-law, a cattle-farming Republican in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, used to smoke pot and spend hours working in the vegetable garden, (giving new meaning to the term “weeding,” I guess.) The pot-smoking friends inevitably have “cleaning music.” My cleaning music is The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, or occasionally, Xavier Cugat.

I read an article once by acclaimed author Louis Begley where he advocated the “Touch It Once” rule.