Upparel’s 5-Step Guide to Cleaning (at any time of the year!)
Step 1: Start with a To-Do List!
You know the saying — “Fail to plan, plan to fail!”. Start by scoping out your surroundings: What areas need the most work? What do you skip during routine cleaning? Regardless of where you start, having a plan for when you’re tackling each area will keep you focused on the task at hand.
Step 2: Snap a ‘before’ photo ????
If you’re finally going to attend to the odd socks in your laundry or the mismatched Tupperware drawer, why not snap a photo of the chaos to admire your handy work later? It’ll serve as an epic reminder of why your clean was needed, and in this digital age, did it *really* happen if you didn’t post about it?
Step 3: Stay inside, it’s swooping season!
Step 4: You’re gonna need some music ????
“To get you pumped up for all of this Spring Cleaning you’re going to need one helluva playlist. To save you time searching for one or putting one together, we’ve made The Ultimate Wardrobe Clean Out playlist! You can listen to it on Spotify HERE.”
Step 5: Channel your inner Marie Kondo.
Tidying Up with Marie Kondo was released by Netflix in 2019 and swept the country into a cleaning frenzy. Kondo encouraged us to use the ‘KonMari Method’ of tidying up, which is incredibly straightforward. Instead of cleaning room-by-room (which we’ve wrongfully thought was the easiest way of tidying up), Kondo advocates for tidying category-by-category. The categories Kondo suggests tackling are clothes, books, papers, “Komono” (miscellaneous items), and sentimental items.
The trick here is to see if an item “sparks joy”. This means physically picking it up and acknowledging the emotional response you have to it. If it doesn’t “spark joy”, Kondo encourages you to discard it by donating to a charity or moving it on in some other way. Our advice — if you wouldn’t give it to a friend, then don’t offload it to your local Op Shop who are inundated with unsaleable fast fashion and spend millions per year sending these donations to landfill ????