The first warm Saturday of the year, I opened every window in the apartment and immediately saw the winter on everything. A gray film on the north-facing living room glass. Dust bunnies the size of Olive behind the bedroom baseboard heater. A balcony with a sad, crunchy plant and a pile of leaves that blew in sometime in November. It was time.
We spring clean our one-bedroom over one weekend, usually the first one in May. It's 640 square feet, so in theory it shouldn't take two days. In practice, small apartments hide a lot of stuff in very little space, and getting into every corner means moving things that haven't moved since fall. Here's the plan we follow, split so two people can work without tripping over each other in a galley kitchen.
Friday night: prep, not cleaning
We used to start Saturday morning and spend the first hour figuring out what we needed. Now Friday night is for prep only:
- Check supplies: all-purpose spray, glass cleaner, a box of baking soda, white vinegar, microfiber cloths, a new sponge, trash bags. Most of it we already have, but I usually spend $10 to $15 topping up.
- Put a donation box by the door. Anything that leaves the apartment this weekend goes in it.
- Do every last dish so Saturday starts with an empty sink.
- Agree on who does which room. Fighting about this at 9 a.m. Saturday is not fun.
Saturday: top to bottom, back to front
We work from the back of the apartment toward the front door, so we're not tracking through rooms we've already done. And within each room, top to bottom, so dust falls onto surfaces we haven't cleaned yet.
Bedroom (Sam)
Strip the bed and take bedding down to the basement laundry: two washes and two dries for the duvet cover, sheets and pillowcases, which comes to $9.50 in quarters. While that runs, Sam pulls the bed away from the wall, vacuums the baseboard heater fins with the brush attachment, and wipes the closet shelves. Winter sweaters get folded into an under-bed bin. Shorts come out.
Bathroom (me)
Our bathroom has a pedestal sink and no vanity, which means everything lives on a wall shelf and a rolling cart. Spring is when I empty both entirely. Expired sunscreen, half bottles of shampoo nobody likes, a hair mask from 2024. Out. Then I scrub the grout along the tub with a baking soda paste, descale the showerhead by tying a bag of vinegar around it for an hour, and wash the shower curtain liner in the machine with the towels.
Lunch break, mandatory
We learned this one the hard way. The year we skipped lunch, we got snippy by 2 p.m. and called it quits halfway through the kitchen. Now we stop, eat sandwiches on the balcony, and look at the clean bedroom through the door like proud parents.
Sunday: kitchen, living room, balcony
Kitchen (both of us)
A galley kitchen is the one place we have to work as a pair, because it's hard to do alone and impossible to do with two people in it at once. So one person empties a cabinet onto the table, the other wipes it out, and then we put back only what we actually use. Every spring the pantry gives up a few mystery cans and a bag of rice from a previous era. The fridge gets fully emptied, shelves washed in the tub, and the gaskets wiped. Then the oven gets a baking-soda paste that sits while we do the living room.
Living room (me)
Windows first, inside and out where I can reach. North-facing windows never get direct sun, so they get dingy fast and nobody notices until spring light makes it obvious. Then the curtains go in the wash, the couch cushions get vacuumed underneath (we found $1.35 and a cat toy), and the rug gets dragged out to the balcony for a beating.
Balcony (Sam)
Sweep, hose down with a bucket since we don't have a spigot, and wipe the two folding chairs. The dead plant gets composted and replaced with a cheap pot of herbs. It's west-facing, so basil does well out there by June.
What it's really about
Honestly, the cleaning is half of it. The other half is the donation box. By Sunday evening it usually holds a dozen things we've been stepping around all winter. Removing them makes more difference in a small apartment than any amount of scrubbing. We drop the box at a thrift store on the way to get takeout Sunday night, which has become the official end of spring cleaning.
Then we sit on a couch we can see the floor under, with the windows still open, too tired to talk much. Olive patrols every room to confirm the new arrangement, sniffs the balcony herbs, and goes to sleep on the clean duvet.
