Disclosure – this is a sponsored post

People usually associate deep cleaning their house with Spring but for me it’s all about January and that post-Christmas haze. Despite going back to work last week my house still has all the echoes of Christmas – a pile of Christmas cards are waiting to be recycled, the odd decoration is still up and there is a stash of Christmas sweets and chocolates I just don’t know what to do with.

Top tips for clearing up after Christmas

1. It’s not just the remains of Christmas that I want to deal with however. My children persuaded me to put up our Christmas tree early in December, which meant when we took it down on the 6th of January the house needed a really good clean. Our cleaner quit at the end of the year and we didn’t really want to replace her, which means the cleaning has now fallen to me. Thankfully I only work 4 days a week so I can spend time tidying and cleaning whilst everyone is at work and the house is quiet. Over the next few weeks I will be doing a deep clean of every room in the house.

2. We’ve managed to accumulate a lot of boxes of ‘things’ which needed sorting. Our spare room ends up being a bit of a dumping ground, but with visitors over Christmas we needed to empty the room and make it useable again. There was so much junk – toys the children have grown out of, broken toys, spare bedding and all sorts. It was kind of embarrassing just how much stuff we were keeping! So this week I will be arranging for someone to come and take all our junk away.

3. Whilst we were tackling the house of course we decided to get a new puppy! What a crazy idea that was! We had no idea about what getting a puppy entailed but we knew we had to tackle the garden and make it a safe place. The children don’t use the garden much in Winter and so we needed to do a lot of rubbish clearance in the garden.

I sent both children out with bags to pick up rubbish and they found all sorts, from Nerf bullets to pieces of Bunch o Balloons. We collected old broken toys and things they had grown out of and made a great pile of rubbish to be disposed of. We also patched up a couple of holes and added a few panels to the bottom of the garden gate – just in case! We’ll definitely be doing a tip run soon.

4. We were away over the Christmas holidays so missed a few rubbish collections. Usually we recycle a lot but we ended up with lots of bags of wrapping paper and toy packaging that couldn’t be recycled. There were quite a few bags put out for the bin men, much more than normal. My son has already asked if we can cut down on our waste next Christmas. He’s already thinking about renting a Christmas tree after he saw this mentioned on Blue Peter.

5 I noticed a lot of shops promoting a plastic free Christmas and this is definitely something we want to explore next year. I would love to use fabric to wrap some of our gifts next year but there are plenty of other ways to reduce waste over the Christmas holidays. A lot of our friends don’t send Christmas cards, instead making a donation to charity and sending an electronic message. I love writing Christmas cards so I’m not sure I’m ready for this just yet. We tried to stick to paper which could be recycled (but failed massively) and we didn’t buy any new Christmas decorations.

I can see that my house will be back to normal soon. It already feels fresher and less cluttered and ready to face 2020. Do you have a big clear out in January or do you save it all for Spring instead?