When Should I Start Spring Cleaning For CNY? Chinese New Year is mainly about the opportunity to start your life anew. It is a time when you purify your life from all points of view. It may have to do with refreshing your wardrobe, changing your hairstyle, or renovating and cleaning your house.
Spring cleaning home has a special significance during the Lunar New Year holidays. People have the tradition to offer deep cleaning to their houses to sweep away bad luck. But when exactly you should start spring cleaning? Read on to know the answer, as well as learn other useful tips for the Chinese New Year.
When to start CNY cleaning?
Chinese New Year involves 15 days of celebration and festive events. But the holiday is not only about those 2 weeks of partying. There is one week in advance when people prepare for the New Year. The preparations are pretty intense, so everybody is in constant haste to manage to finish all tasks on the checklist.
House spring cleaning receives special attention. It can take a couple of days and it involves a top to bottom purification of each room. The cleaning officially starts on the 23rd day of the 12th lunar month. There is approximately one week that you can dedicate to deep cleaning your house.
Cleaning on the Chinese New Year’s Day
When you start your spring cleaning, you should know that tradition forbids you to clean on CNY day. You must not perform any cleaning tasks after New Year’s Eve at midnight. Else, according to popular belief, you allow good luck to escape and bring bad luck back into your house.
That is, you should finish cleaning after guests have left before the clock strikes midnight. Even if you didn’t manage to do little things, you would have to stop.
Ancestral tradition considers Chinese New Year’s day a sacred time when homeowners can’t get their hands dirty. You must only rest and celebrate the arrival of the New Year. Everything you hadn’t cleaned before midnight will get the chance to become clean on the second day of the CNY. As the first day passes by, you get permission to continue tidying up your house, if any dirty areas remain.
How to prepare the house for CNY?
If you don’t want to end up with dirt on the first Chinese New Year’s day, you have to work hard. You should put a value on each day of the preparation period to help each corner of your house spotlessly clean. CNY spring cleaning is a major whole-house task that requires a lot of effort and dedication. If your house is big, you especially have to rush to manage to sweep away all bad luck.
You don’t want your house to be messy on Chinese New Year’s night. It will mean that negative energy still lingers in your house, and there is little space for good luck to come in. To prepare your home for Lunar New Year, declutter your rooms by placing all useless or old stuff in the trash bag. Sort your clothes and shoes and donate those that don’t fit you anymore or are too old.
Dust and vacuum the carpets and upholstery, take your bedding to the laundry and treat your mattress with baking soda. Wipe the furniture down and also pay attention to the areas underneath and behind it. Disinfect areas with much finger traffic, and clean and sanitize the bathroom to the finest detail. Clean and polish the windows to a sparkling appearance. Moreover, wipe down the microwave, oven, and fridge from the inside.
Remove the tough stains from carpets, sofas, and curtains using professional or homemade products. Also, don’t forget about grout. It is a dirty area that many people overlook during the regular weekly clean. A CNY cleaning is a perfect occasion to make your bathroom grout as white as snow.
When Should I Start Spring Cleaning For CNY? – Conclusion
You can start CNY cleaning on the 23rd day of the last month of the lunar calendar. Tradition doesn’t allow you to clean on the first day of the Chinese New Year. That’s why you are good to clean just as much as you can. Then, do the rest of the cleaning on the second day of the holiday or later.
Luckily, there is around one week available for you to prepare for the Chinese New Year. That’s why in most cases you will manage to clean the house in time. If you are looking for reliable spring cleaning services for the CNY, you can contact us here: +65 9186 9762