Outdoor Spring Clean Up Checklist

It’s spring! And that means it’s time for some spring clean up of the home exterior and landscaping. I’m sharing a free printable checklist and sharing what we’ve done to get our patio and yard ready for the spring.

I don’t know about you, but I find spring outdoor spring clean up totally overwhelming and honestly the tasks aren’t the most fun for me. But they feel so good done and it feels even better to check everything off of a list (it can’t be just me that loves checklists!).  So this year I partnered with WORX to put together a spring clean up checklist and share how I’m getting the job done. They sent along their WORX HydroShot 40V for me to test out and help get some of the heavy cleaning done (spoiler- it’s so darn handy!). From power washing decks to weeding the gardens, cleaning patio furniture and filling planters- this was a busy weekend!

Alright, ready to grab the free printable for yourself and to do a bit of a ‘clean with me’?! Me! And just in full transparency, I’ve never done a clean with me before (it seems to be a thing on YouTube!?) so this is my first and my neighbour watched THE WHOLE TIME I was talking to the camera. Oh, you don’t video your yard clean up? Huh! ?

GET YOUR FREE PRINTABLE SPRING CLEAN UP CHECKLIST HERE

Now that you have a checklist… let’s clean up!

*phew* Seriously, yard work is so exhausting. I’m hoping that once we get our yard into shape (and our exterior remodel is done!) that it will be enjoyable. But right now, I’ve only done like half of that checklist and I’m DONE. Ha! If you make it through the full list, please brag because you deserve to! And if you do this every year without a checklist, you deserve a nap and know that I’m so darn impressed. So I mentioned in the video that we’ve started on our next big project… siding! Which is probably why my One Room Challenge is crawling along! I’m SO excited to get all of this old wood siding off the house and put on some termite resistant board but in the meantime this is also giving me excuses to skip some of the tasks on that list!

I didn’t have to wash the siding, gutters, soffets, or even windows (we’re working through replacing them all!) but will do this once the siding is on and done. We’re also tearing off our decks (wood again) and rebuilding them with treated so I didn’t need to clean those or stain them. I feel a little bit like it’s cheating, but I’m glad that my first time taking on a proper spring clean up was scaled back… holy smokes it’s hard! Haha- I’d rather side a house ;P

This took me three days. I didn’t film the first day, but I pruned back all those wild vines(?) coming over our fence and raked the yard and all the leaves off the brick patio to bring it all to the landfill. We did this so we could build that black patio screen on the concrete wall. I can’t wait to put together a tutorial for this. Day 1 that I filmed, I set up the HydroShot and cleaned the brick raised garden, weeded the raised garden, and started to clean out the water feature (so gross!). 

But before I did any of that, I set up the WORX HydroShot 40V to play. Honestly, it made all these jobs so much easier. I didn’t have to scrub to get the mildew off the bricks and I didn’t have to take buckets to empty out that stinky pond. I chat a bit about it in the video but if you’re skipping over that, I thought I’d share some cool features of the WORX HydroShot.

It’s battery operated so you can take it anywhere without an extension cord and to make it extra portable, you don’t even need to attach a hose. It can attach to your hose (what I used most of the time since we had it in our yard anyways) but you can also use this portable hose they include that sucks up water from almost any source (fresh water- it does have a filter though so it doesn’t have to be clean!). I used this hose in our little pond water feature and shot all that water down into the green space behind our house to empty it out. It was so helpful! It isn’t a pressure washer, it’s a power cleaner. It has about 5-6x more PSI than a garden hose sprayer so it definitely cuts more grime. For a lot of these tasks, I wouldn’t want more than that anyways. We have that older fence that I wouldn’t want to peel paint off of and I wanted to be careful about washing my patio furniture. You have two different pressure settings on the WORX HydroShot, you just press a button to switch between them. 

Alright, before I move on to the rest of my clean up, they also sent along a coupon code so if you order from their site, you can get 15% off! CPHYDRO

Day two I cleaned the brick patio again (I’d missed some spots) and we moved our outdoor furniture out of storage. If you love it and want to see more- I have a whole post about this couch from last year right here. I loved that I could use the lower pressure setting to clean the patio furniture without damaging it but still while getting enough pressure to really get it clean. SO much dirt came out of our white cushions!

Last but not least, I planted this empty pot that was on our patio. I can’t wait to get out here and enjoy this patio once the sun dries those cushions! It will be the perfect resting spot while we coffee break from our siding project! I hope that you find this checklist helpful and if you are thinking about a pressure washer or alternatives that you found this informative! Let me know if you have any questions about the WORX HydroShot and I’m happy to share my experience!