Posted by Mike Smith :: August 22, 2008 @ 9:48 am

Spring-cleaning may be better known, but a summer spruce-up can be just as effective. Evaluating your belongings and performing certain cleaning tasks are easier in different seasons.

Over a recent weekend, we performed a summer spruce-up in our house. It wasn’t a top to bottom cleaning like the one we do in the spring, but was nonetheless quite productive. We mainly cleaned out closets and the garage. De-cluttering closets can be a little bit frustrating because after the work is complete, a closed closet looks the same as if you hadn’t done any work. Knowing that the extra space you created could then be used to de-clutter the visible areas of your living space is decent consolation.

To give you an example of how time of year can affect your cleaning, consider the college textbooks that we found in some of the boxes. Selling books online in the spring is highly competitive because so many college students are finishing their classes and selling their books as well. Selling books now, closer to the start of a new semester was much more profitable. Other tasks can have similar benefits. I wouldn’t sort through my winter clothes now, because my use habits on those items aren’t fresh in my mind. But I was able to decide which of my summer clothes are being used and which could be donated.

By evaluating each item encountered in our spruce-up effort, we could decide whether it would go to the best use by selling it, donating it, or in some cases throwing it out. In the end, we had two carloads worth of clothes and items to donate. While that will lead to a small tax deduction, we also earned some real cash by selling some of our other items online. Even those few items that couldn’t be sold or donated freed up some extra space in our home, which has a value all its own. Could your home benefit from a summer spruce-up as well?