Jason Fitzpatrick
We’re continuing our tour through the living room today by getting the winter grime off the windows and deep cleaning the treatments.
If you’ve been following along with our Spring Cleaning Challenge, you know that we tackled windows and window treatments in the bedroom back in week one of the challenge.
With that in mind, we’re not going to reprint the entire cleaning process again for today’s entry in the challenge—we’re simply going to redirect you to the guide here.
To help you tackle the living room windows more effectively, however, we do have some additional tips that will help you make short work of the task.
- When cleaning the inside and outside of the window, stick to using horizontal or vertical motions for the inside and outside, respectively. This will help you identify which side the streaks are on. The streaks go left-to-right? It’s the inside of the pane with the smudges.
- Unless you have massive picture windows or a sliding glass door, skip the squeegee. When tackling a large window (and in the hands of an experienced user), a window squeegee is practically cleaning magic. But for smaller windows, especially older windows with muntins (the criss-cross wood grid that subdivides the panes), using a squeegee is an impractical pain.
- Razer scrapers are so useful when cleaning windows, especially when removing gunk pets and kids have stuck to the inside of the window, and gunk mother nature has stuck to the outside.
- Vacuum the window, window frame, window tracks, and even the screen with your vacuum’s brush attachment thoroughly before getting the window cleaning solution out. Every bit of dust and crud you remove with the vacuum is dust that won’t turn into a muddy slurry when you dampen it with the cleaner.
- For deep window tracks like those found on slider windows, a non-abrasive sponge—thanks to its square edges—often does a more thorough job cleaning the grooves than a damp rag.
- If you mix your own solution, it’s worth using distilled water to minimize water spots.
- Deal with streaks with a clean microfiber cloth—there’s no need to wash the whole window again to get rid of a streak or two. Simply buff it out with your microfiber cloth using a circular motion.
With our guide and these handy tips, you’ll have sparkling living room windows in no time.
While you’re cleaning your windows and working through your living room, we’d encourage you to keep the lessons from day one of this week, when we decluttered the living room, in mind. Is there still a bunch of stuff in your way while cleaning the windows? Time to declutter more!
As always, you can follow along on our Spring Cleaning Challenge landing page or get the lessons, along with all our other great content, delivered right to your inbox!
