Spring cleaning is overwhelming in general. This year it is especially difficult considering everyone has been cooped up in their homes for over a year now! With Amazon hitting record numbers of sales, the viral pandemic has now caused a clutter pandemic. Homes have more ticky-tak items than ever before. This calls for a post-pandemic spring cleaning & junk removal.
As the pandemic, as well as winter, begins to come to an end it’s time to think about post-pandemic spring cleaning and junk removal. This article will take the whole overwhelming process and take you through a simple 4 step guide to post-pandemic spring cleaning and junk removal.
Step 1: Planning Your Post-Pandemic Spring Cleaning & Junk Removal
Planning is the first step to getting junk cleared out from your home. Start by making a list of rooms you want cleaned out. Prioritize rooms or areas of your home that you want cleaned out most and work your way down. A lot of times the rooms that you want cleaned out most require the most amount of work. When this happens, procrastination creeps in and you wind up putting these rooms last on your to-do list. They then often get forgotten about and remain cluttered with junk.
After you have a list of prioritized rooms, it’s time to create a quick plan for sorting. As you go through items, you will be faced with multiple decisions. A few common thoughts could be:
- -Do I want to keep this?
- -Do I want to throw this away?
- -Should I donate this?
- -Is this recyclable?
- -Would Aunt Kathy want this?
- -Maybe I can sell this?
- -Why did I buy this?
- -etc
The list goes on and on. There are numerous potential decisions you will be faced with when looking at each item. For this reason, it’s important to choose a set of 2 predetermined categories for every item. These categories are:
- -Definitely want to keep
- -Definitely don’t want to keep
Pro Tip: Don’t worry about whether Aunt Kathy wants the extra hangers in the closet or not right now (she probably bought some during the pandemic anyway!). All joking aside, this will be taken care of in Step 3: Family & Friend Donations. For now, you want your mindset to be ‘is this junk staying or leaving’. You want to focus on efficiency during this step. It’s important to reiterate this step can take exponentially longer if you don’t actively control it.
Step 2: Sorting for spring cleaning & junk removal
The second step in the post-pandemic spring cleaning and junk removal. It is probably going to take the most amount of time to complete. This is the step where you actually go through and make decisions about what is staying and what is going. If you have available space in your home to consolidate all items you don’t want we highly recommend you do so. This can be in the garage or spare room you don’t frequent. If not, create areas in each room to consolidate all unwanted items. This will come in handy later.
Pro Tip: this step can become overly time consuming if you let it. It’s important to not get overly sentimental about items you’re going through. Remember, you only want 2 categories to be in your head when you are going through this step- do I want to keep this or not.
Step 3: Family & Friend Donations before junk removal
Now that you’ve successfully sorted through all items, you should have consolidation of the junk you don’t want. Here comes the time to think about Aunt Kathy and those hangers! The hard part of post-pandemic spring cleaning and junk removal is the actual sorting. Once that is done, you can contact any friends or family that may want some junk you want to get rid of. This is one of the reasons it is recommended that you consolidate all the items into a single area. If all unwanted items are located in a specific area of the garage, your friends and family will have easy access to all of the junk. They also wont have to take a tour of every room to see what you have!
Pro Tip: it’s easy to want something, it’s harder to take it. What is meant by this is many family and friends will say they want certain items. But when it comes time to actually pick them up, they push it off or may have second thoughts. With this being said make sure to give yourself and others a firm deadline to pick anything up. This will prevent people from holding up your spring cleaning and junk removal by always promising ‘next week I’ll get it’.
Step 4: Hire the Junk Removal Professional
At this point you should be left with a consolidated area (or areas) of items that simply need to go. The easiest way to complete this step is to hire a junk removal professional to come in and haul the remaining unwanted items away. If you aren’t familiar with junk removal companies or how they operate, read how our junk removal process works.
Simply put, we give a general estimate over the phone based on the items you tell us. After booking a time, the crew will then come out and confirm the estimate and proceed to haul all items away! It’s as easy as that. To get an idea of how much your junk removal will cost, feel free to use our free online junk estimator here.
If you are interested in getting an estimate and booking in your post pandemic junk removal click the button below!