Starting your spring cleaning? Lookup! Ceilings, ceiling fans and lights first!
If you’re following along my Kitchen Deep Spring Cleaning Master List, you know it’s time to start Spring Cleaning: Ceilings, Ceiling Fans, and Lights. If you haven’t started spring cleaning that’s a great place to start. Today is all about looking up. How often do you actually look up at your ceiling? Probably not often, but it gets really dirty up there. So, let’s get started.
Why start with the ceiling? Because according to Sir Isaac Newton, what goes up must come down. You’d hate to have everything looking pristine and picture perfect in your kitchen and then realize you have tons of cobwebs in the corners of your ceiling and light fixtures and then have all of that dust fall on everything you just cleaned. Let’s start with the ceiling.
Tools Needed For Ceiling:
A broom, or duster long enough to reach the ceiling and those corners
Dust rags, microfiber cloths or paper towels
Glass Cleaner
Mrs. Meyer’s Multi-purpose Cleaner
To begin, I went ahead and took down my curtains to keep them from getting any dustier. Starting in one corner of the room, start removing cobwebs and dust and work your way around the room. Check the ceiling around light fixtures, smoke alarms and ceiling fans and the tops of cabinets for dust.
Take down light fixtures and clean with glass cleaner inside and outside of the globes and set to the side to dry. Don’t forget to wipe the dust off your light bulbs! But do this with the lights off. Replace any burned out bulbs now, or replace with more energy-efficient ones. Replace globes when dry.
Ceiling fans get really dirty, at least in my house. In most rooms of the house, I can use the pillowcase trick to capture the dust off the blades, but in the kitchen where cooking oil travels in the air, the dust tends to stick a little. Gross! See the pic? I’m almost embarrassed by it. Please ignore the mess in the background! This is a real house and that just happens to be the next room on my spring cleaning list. Look the broom is in the corner, so you know I’ve been cleaning! Also, on my to-do list, get the trim molding done!
Told you it was icky! So how do you get a really icky ceiling fan sparkling clean? First I used my vacuum cleaner with the long hose attachment and vacuumed off as much dust as I could. Then I took all of the blades off and took off the globes.
Cleaners used for ceiling fan:
White Vinegar
Baking Soda
Dawn Dish Soap
Wash Rag
First I used hot water and Dawn and gave them a good wash. This removed a good bit of stuff. Then I scrubbed them with a paste of baking soda and vinegar. It was amazing! A couple of the blades I had to go over a couple of times, but they came clean. I did the same things with the globes. Place them on paper towels to dry. I guess I should also include that it takes a Route 44 drink from Sonic and some pretzels to get this done. Look! My cow is hiding! He’s shy.
See how pretty the blades are now? Just ignore where I got paint on them from when I painted the ceiling. Note to self…take the ceiling fan down before painting the ceiling! Next, I cleaned the fan itself and I used Mrs. Myers Multi-Purpose Cleaner. Once everything is really dry, put it back together and you’ll have a super, sparkly ceiling fan!
That’s it! Next, you can move on to windows and walls. But at least now with clean lights, you can see everything that needs to be cleaned. I was surprised, how much brighter my kitchen was after cleaning my light fixtures and they weren’t dirty. On to the next part of spring cleaning! Don’t forget to download your Kitchen Deep Spring Cleaning Master List!
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