What constitutes “spring cleaning” and why is it different than household cleaning the rest of the year?

To find the answer to this question, we have to look back in history, before most homes had gas or electric furnaces and burned oil, coal, or wood for heat.

House Cleaning Delray Beach — The Bad Old Days

In the early part of the 20th Century and before, most homes accumulated many, many layers of dust, soot, and smoke during the winter months.

Mostly, this was due to the non-environmentally friendly exhaust from their coal-burning furnaces or wood-burning stoves or fireplaces. Unlike the relatively clean byproducts of burning natural gas, these older types of home heating fuel would pollute both the environment and the interior of the home.

But most houses back then were also very poorly insulated. High-tech insulation wasn’t developed until the mid-20th Century. So most people were likely to seal up their houses up during the cold winter months, refusing to open a window and reluctant to even open doors until the weather outside got warmer.

House Cleaning Delray Beach – Enter Spring

By springtime, people were more than ready to open up their houses and give them a good scrubbing. All the buildup of soot and smoke on the walls and ceilings — as well as clothes, skin, and every other surface — needed to be removed with a deep cleaning.

Thus, spring cleaning became an annual tradition.

Today, spring cleaning is still something many people like to do in the spring, even though there isn’t as desperate a need to do so as there was in the past.

Contemporary spring cleaning typically involves deep cleaning carpets, cleaning the exterior of windows, and other simple jobs yet important jobs that can’t easily be done during cold weather months.

In Florida, of course, the weather is warm enough to clean the whole house inside and out all year round.

Yet the annual tradition of spring cleaning persists.