Tenner Week Spring Clean Feb / Mar 2018: Sunday

It’s the last day of the Tenner Week Spring Clean challenge. Are you ready for one last cleanup session?

Today’s activity is called Fridge, freezer or oven. You can pick whichever one of these you prefer, depending on what needs the work doing most urgently, or how much time you have to spare today.

You can also vary how deep the cleaning level is. For example:

• A quick wipe of the fridge door and any crumbs or obvious marks
• Take everything out of the fridge, give it a scrub, and use detergent or anti-bacterial liquid on the interior
• Tidy up the freezer and quickly organise its contents
• Defrost the freezer fully, remove and wash all the drawers, and sterilise the shelves and door
• Wipe down the cooker top, clean the outside of the oven
• Do a deep clean on the oven with its automatic cleaning mode or a commercial oven cleaner

Safety first: If you’re using a commercial oven cleaner spray, foam or liquid, always remember to handle it with extreme care. Some of these products are caustic and can cause burns, so make sure you read and follow the instructions.

Also, if you have any tasks that you skipped during the week, feel free to catch up on them today if you feel like it.

What’s happening here

Yesterday’s activity was ‘floors and skirting boards’, and the original plan here was to clean up the ground floor, so I did a deep clean on the rugs, doormat, cat beds and skirting boards downstairs, and Beau swept the floors. I was on a roll so I carried on and vacuumed the stairs, cleaned the bathroom floor, descaled the taps and vacuumed the bedroom carpets as well. It had also stopped snowing (hurrah!), so I opened the upstairs windows a little for a couple of hours to air the rooms.

We had good food yesterday too, including homemade muffins for breakfast, vegetable soup and homemade rolls for lunch, smoked haddock and spinach for dinner and tinned fruit for dessert. We were running low on basic ingredients though, so we finally had to go out to the shops for some potatoes and butter. My share of the groceries was £1.35, so I’ve finally broken into that £10 note.

We could have gone out to the cheap supermarket that’s a few streets from our house, but there was a fair amount of ice left on the pavements and we were also getting fog and drizzle during the afternoon so the groceries came from a nearby convenience store instead. They could have been slightly cheaper but it’s not the end of the world.

Today I’m thinking about cleaning the oven, but I might clean out the fridge instead. We didn’t do a sneaky stockpile before the week started – no cheating here – so there’s hardly any food in there at all right now which makes for much easier cleaning, so let’s see how enthusiastic / lazy I’m feeling after I finish my morning coffee.

Money spent yesterday: £1.35

Total spent so far: £1.35

How’s your Spring Cleaning coming along? Is your budget holding up as well?