A spring clean checklist for a coastal home

Why a coastal spring clean is its own job

Living on the Eurobodalla coast is a good life, but it's hard on a house. The salt air drifts in off the water from Durras down to Moruya and settles on everything, glass, window tracks, flyscreens, door handles, the lot. Add the fine sand that gets walked through every door over summer and you end up with a film that a normal weekly tidy never quite shifts.

Spring is the right time to deal with it because the worst of the winter damp has passed and the big holiday season hasn't started yet. You get a quiet window to reset the whole place before the December rush, the visitors, and the heat. This checklist works through a coastal home room by room, with the jobs that actually matter here, not a generic list copied from a city blog.

We're Capital Coastal Cleaning, a local Indigenous-owned business based in Batemans Bay. Tyson started it in 2023, and these days it is Tyson, Shanice and Lisa doing the work across the coast. We use low-tox products, we're police-checked and fully insured, and we're open seven days. So this is the list we actually use ourselves.

Start with the salt: windows, tracks and screens

On the coast, glass is the first thing to tackle and the thing most people get wrong. Salt doesn't just sit on the surface, it bonds to the glass, so a quick spray and wipe leaves streaks and a hazy film. The fix is to rinse first. Hose the windows down or wipe them with a clean wet microfibre to lift the salt off before you go anywhere near a cleaner, then do your proper clean. Skip the rinse and you're just smearing salt around.

The window tracks are where the real grime hides. Sand, dead bugs and salt build into a gritty paste in the bottom channel. Vacuum the loose stuff out first with a crevice tool, then go along the track with an old toothbrush and a damp cloth. A bit of bicarb and warm water cuts through the build-up without anything harsh.

Don't forget the flyscreens. Pop them out, lay them flat on the grass or the driveway, and give them a gentle hose and a soft brush. Coastal screens clog with salt and pollen and that's what stops the breeze coming through on a hot night. Let them dry fully before they go back in so you aren't trapping moisture in the frame.

If your home has a lot of glass, big sliders, louvres, a second storey with water views, exterior windows are worth handing off. Our window cleaning service covers the high and awkward panes safely, and it's one of the jobs where the difference is immediately obvious.

Fight the damp before it becomes mould

Winter on the South Coast is wet, and a closed-up house holds that moisture. Come spring, the early signs of mould show up in the usual spots: bathroom ceilings, the grout in the shower, the wall behind the wardrobe, window reveals where condensation pools, and inside cupboards on an external wall.

Walk the house with the lights on and actually look. Black speckling, a musty smell when you open a cupboard, or paint that has started to bubble are all telling you the same thing. Catch it early and it wipes off. Leave it and it gets into the plaster and the silicone and becomes a much bigger job.

For surface mould, a gentle clean and good airflow does most of the work. Throw the windows open on a dry, breezy day and let the place air out properly, ideally cross-ventilating front to back. Pull furniture off external walls by a few centimetres so air can move behind it. Check the seals around the shower and bath, because cracked silicone lets water track into the wall where you can't see it.

If the mould is across a ceiling, spread through grout, or coming back no matter what you do, that's a sign moisture is getting in somewhere and it's worth getting proper eyes on it rather than scrubbing the same patch every fortnight.

Carpets, rugs and the sand you can't see

Coastal carpets carry a season of sand whether you can see it or not. It works down into the pile, sits below the surface, and grinds against the fibres every time someone walks across it. That grit is what wears a carpet out, not the foot traffic itself. Vacuuming lifts the top layer but it doesn't reach the sand that has settled at the base.

Spring is the time for a proper carpet clean. Before the cleaner arrives, give the carpets a slow, thorough vacuum, go over the high-traffic runs twice, and move the light furniture so the edges and under-rug areas get done too. Treat any obvious marks early rather than letting them set over summer.

Take your rugs and mats outside while you're at it. Hang them over a fence or rail, give them a beat, and let them air in the sun for a few hours. The doormats especially, they're the front line against tracked-in sand, so a clean mat at every door saves the carpet behind it.

Our carpet cleaning is a flat 50 dollars per room plus GST, and we quote it fixed up front so you know the number before we start. There's no minimum when the carpet is part of an end of lease clean, and a standalone carpet job has a two hour minimum (120 dollars plus GST). Spring is also when a lot of holiday-let owners get the carpets done so the place presents well for the season ahead.

The kitchen reset

The kitchen collects the kind of grime a wipe-down never touches. Spring is when you go behind and underneath. Pull the fridge out, clean the coils and the floor beneath it, and wipe down the wall behind, because that's where dust and grease quietly build into a sticky layer over a year.

Empty the pantry and the fridge completely. Check use-by dates, bin what has gone off, and wipe every shelf before things go back. It's a half-hour job that you'll be glad of in three months. Take the same approach to the range hood filter, which clogs with grease and is usually overlooked. Most metal filters can soak in hot water with a bit of dishwashing liquid and come up clean.

Give the oven a proper going-over rather than the quick surface wipe. The door glass, the racks and the base all benefit from a longer soak with a low-tox cleaner so you aren't breathing fumes in your own kitchen. Finish by running an empty dishwasher cycle with the filter cleaned out, because a coastal house with hard use over summer tends to leave the dishwasher smelling off if it never gets reset.

Bathrooms and the spots that get skipped

Bathrooms in a coastal home take a beating from humidity and from the constant in and out after the beach. Start with the exhaust fan, because most people never touch it. Pop the cover, vacuum the dust off, and wipe it down. A working fan is your best defence against the mould we talked about earlier, and a clogged one does nothing.

Tackle the grout and the silicone next. A soft brush and a gentle paste lift most discolouration, and if the silicone around the bath or basin has gone black or is lifting at the edge, note it down to replace, because cleaning won't fix perished silicone. Descale the shower head, which on coastal water builds up mineral scale that weakens the spray, by soaking it in warm white vinegar.

Don't skip the spots that get missed every week: the base of the toilet and behind it, the underside of the toilet seat hinges, the tracks on a shower screen, and the toothbrush holder and soap dishes that grow their own grime. These are small jobs that make the whole room feel genuinely clean rather than just tidy.

Outside: decks, yards and the salt-air zone

Outdoor areas are half the reason people live here, and they need a spring reset too. Decks and outdoor furniture get a grey film of salt and grime over winter that a sweep doesn't shift, so a proper wash makes a real difference before you start using the space again. Clear the gutters while you're at it, because the leaf litter that built up over autumn and winter is a fire and water risk as we head into the warmer months.

The yard usually needs attention after a wet winter has let everything go a bit wild. Overgrown grass, weeds through the garden beds and a build-up of green waste are all standard by spring. Getting the lawn and yard knocked into shape now means it's manageable through summer rather than a jungle by Christmas.

If you've had a winter of projects, or you're clearing out for a sale or a new tenant, the rubbish tends to pile up. We can handle the lawn and yard work and the rubbish removal as part of the same visit, so the whole outside gets sorted in one go rather than across three different weekends.

For holiday-let owners around the bay, this outside reset is the one guests notice first. A clean deck, a tidy yard and clear gutters set the tone before anyone has even walked through the front door.

If you're turning over a rental or holiday let

Spring is changeover season on the coast. Long-term tenants move on, holiday lets get readied for the season, and owners want their places presenting well. If you're at the end of a lease, a spring clean turns into a bond clean, and that's a different standard altogether.

A bond clean is done to the REINSW exit standard, which is a proper agent-grade check of every surface, inside the oven, inside cupboards, walls, skirtings, tracks, the works. We back ours with a bond-back guarantee, so if the agent picks something up on the clean we come back and sort it. Our bond clean is a fixed price by size, plus GST, from 450 dollars for a one bedroom up to 850 dollars for a four bedroom, and like everything we do, it's quoted fixed up front rather than by the hour, so there are no surprises on the invoice.

For holiday lets, a deeper spring clean before the season saves you the scramble later and means your first guests walk into a place that genuinely shines. Either way the trick is to book it in before the rush, because once summer hits, the calendar on this coast fills up fast.

When to do it yourself and when to call us

Plenty of this list is a good weekend of work you can do yourself, and there's real satisfaction in it. The window tracks, the pantry, the flyscreens, the doormats, those are all jobs worth rolling your sleeves up for. The point of a checklist is to make sure nothing gets forgotten, and a coastal home has a few extra items a normal list would miss.

The jobs worth handing over are the ones that need gear, height or time you'd rather spend elsewhere: carpet cleaning, exterior and high windows, gutters, a full oven, or the whole lot done in one hit so you can get on with your spring. We bring our own low-tox products, we're fully insured and police-checked, and we're open seven days, which matters when you're juggling work and a changeover.

We're local, we know what this coast does to a house, and we've earned a 5.0 rating from 110 Google reviews doing exactly this kind of work from Durras to Moruya. If you want a hand with the spring clean, or a fixed quote on a bond or carpet job, give us a call on 0479 184 498 and we'll sort out a time that suits.