Giving your home a good scrub when the weather turns warm is a time-honored ritual of homeownership, but you don’t have to do it all yourself. There are many great spring cleaning apps to help with home maintenance and chores, from outsourcing errands to unburdening yourself of your extra possessions.
We reviewed dozens of the most popular service and home improvement apps out there to find our 10 favorite apps for cleaning house.
A quick word on apps: startups can come and go, and some take time to grow. Depending on where you live, these services may not be available to you – yet. If any of these isn’t available where you live, a quick online search will likely turn up a similar product available in your market.
1. Get All Kinds of Help from TaskRabbit
TaskRabbit has been around since 2008, and the app is a popular way to match skilled locals, called “taskers,” with homeowners who have chores that need to get done. Think of taskers as your helping hands for the errands you just don’t have time to run and the tasks you can’t seem to make time to do.
This spring cleaning app offers a wide array of services. For example, you hire a tasker to:
- Align your doors.
- Assist your mother with her yard work.
- Make a Home Depot run for the house cleaning items you need.
- Install shelves.
You can even hire taskers to help with work far beyond your standard spring cleaning needs. If you find yourself so excited about finishing your spring cleaning that you throw a backyard barbeque to celebrate, you might hire a Tasker to help you pick up ice at the last minute.
After acquiring TaskRabbit in late 2017, last March IKEA announced a service partnership with TaskRabbit for furniture assembly and installation. Choosing to go with this official partner could spare you the relationship-straining challenge of interpreting pictorial furniture assembly instructions with your loved ones.
2. Hire a Cleaning or Home Repair Specialist on Handy
While Handy offers some of the same services that TaskRabbit does, its focus is more narrowly associated with the home. In fact, its bread-and-butter offerings are house cleaning and installations.
Sure, there are maid services out there, but Handy isn’t quite that either. If you’re looking for help with a deep clean or finally organizing the items in your garage, Handy has that helper for hire.
Handy also includes a store with a limited inventory of home appliances. Buying them includes expert installation. If the home security system or air conditioner you’re looking for happens to be in Handy’s shop, you may want to check it out.
3. Assign and Manage Chores Using OurHome
One of the most daunting tasks at any age can be managing chores, but the app OurHouse is an easy way to get tasks under control. Whether you and your spouse are the only two at home, or you have four teenagers to wrangle, OurHome can help you assign tasks to your housemates. (See how nice and equal that sounds?)
The OurHome website even recommends using this tool to assign tasks to visiting in-laws. While this may sound daring, it’s not a bad idea. Through the app, you can send them reminders and include detailed descriptions or shopping lists to go along with tasks.
To get your kids involved, OurHouse offers a points and rewards system that incentivizes participation. This could turn spring cleaning housework into your own home Olympics!
4. Outsource Your Laundry with Rinse
Laundry is the chore that never ends: there’s always more to wash and dry, and never quite enough time to get it all done before leaving the house. When it’s time for spring cleaning, do yourself a favor and outsource this task, especially for heavy-duty laundry like curtains and comforters.
The laundry services app Rinse can free up your schedule and mental energy for chores that require your focus.
One caveat: Rinse has a limited geographical range. As they expand, keep an eye out for their service in your area (if they haven’t reached you yet). If you can’t outsource this chore entirely, we still recommend looking for a laundromat with a drop-off service to help manage the amount of time your seasonal laundry takes.
5. Move Big Stuff with Dolly
There’s no reason to move big items by yourself, unless you own a truck and feel passionate about self-sufficiency. For the rest of us, there’s Dolly . While a few apps higher on this list offer moving and heavy lifting on their platforms, Dolly specializes in this area. The fact that everyone on the platform has an appropriate vehicle and strength means that this service is well-priced, and its customer support is great.
When it’s time to dig into spring chores, Dolly can help move bins of yard waste to the stump dump or transport the empties that’ve been building up in the garage to the municipal recycling center.
6. Resell Your Clothes on thredUP
While donating your clothes to Goodwill or another local charity is a wonderful option, if your clothing is more gently worn, you have options. For example, if you’re interested in making a small amount of cash off your clothes, thredUP helps you advertise and coordinate the sale.
Local consignment shops are also an option, of course, but their hours may be inconvenient. There’s always the risk that after you’ve schlepped your clothing down there, they won’t be interested.
Getting rid of extra clothes is a great way to free up space for storage. Reselling those clothes to get cash to reinvest in your home improvement is a great way to cover the cost of your spring cleaning supplies.
7. Find Buyers for Your Gently Used Items on Decluttr
There’s a corner of the app marketplace dedicated to making it easy to donate or sell gently used items without leaving home. Decluttr manages most of the process for you. It offers a forum to advertise and find buyers for gently used items. Slightly easier to use than Craigslist, think of Decluttr as a kind of online pawn shop.
The model is straightforward: you go onto the platform and select the type of item you’d like to sell. Then Decluttr estimates how much you can get for it. Once approved, you send in your wares and the app does the rest. Put your items out into the world and someone else brokers the sale. For a spring cleaner, this is the dream.
There are a few pitfalls. You have to pay a fee – similar to the commission a consignment store charges – and you’re not able to set your own prices. But if your goal is to clean house and get rid of stuff, Decluttr can be an effective way to get rid of electronics and other items you’ve had gathering dust for months.
8. Rehome High-End Furniture with Chairish
Chairish isn’t your mundane Craiglist ad for selling used furniture. It’s a home decorating marketplace for high-end furniture and vintage decor. If part of your spring cleaning means redecorating or getting rid of some bulky furniture items to streamline a room, Chairish is your go-to app.
It works like a consignment center. You get a free membership and can list items for sale. The app charges a 30 percent commission once the item is sold. Best of all, the Chairish app will process shipping details for you since shipping large or fragile items can be tricky. However, local pickups are the easiest to arrange.
The app pays you through PayPal within 48 hours of the finalized sale. Your dashboard tracks all items and where they are in the process, so you have a bird’s eye view of what’s happening.
9. Let Go of College Textbooks with eCampus
If you have college textbooks lying around, you can make some extra cash by selling them online. You can probably make more selling books on eCampus than you would reselling them back to the bookstore you bought them at.
The app is simple to use. You list your books for sale and can either get an instant buyback offer or list it on consignment to sell directly to students. Consignment sales take 15 percent from the sale price but do include a shipping credit so that you can send the book to the student.
10. Get Rid of Odds and Ends (and Everything in Between) with Facebook Marketplace
You probably are already spending time on Facebook. Now you can take advantage of the app to sell anything and everything you don’t want through the Facebook Marketplace . It’s especially good for selling home goods, tools, and clothing.
Marketplace is like Facebook’s very own flea market. You can create a listing in just a couple of minutes by snapping a few photos of the item for sale and then creating a listing description. Open up the sales to your friends’ list and beyond with the app. Most people stay local and get great results selling their stuff within their community. However, you can open the geography up and ship items to people outside of your community that offer to buy your stuff.
Offers come through on Messenger and are tagged as Marketplace messages so that you can keep track of interested people. Arrange for payment and pickup directly in Messenger.
Spring Cleaning Tips
Having a plan is the most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to spring cleaning. You may want to tackle things room by room or work on a specific task in the whole house like clearing out old clothes in all the closets before you move on to the next task. Ultimately, you want to see progress for your work as you move from task to task. This helps keep you motivated to get to the next item on the list.
Take a look at our 15 Spring Cleaning Tips for your best practices in getting your home in order this season.
App or No App, Dig In!
Spring is here. You’ve got all the tools you need to clean your home and get it in shape for the warmest months of the year. At the end of this list, the next step is to get started, whether that’s by downloading an app or making a shopping list of eco-friendly cleaners.
But if you’re not sure where to start spring cleaning or you’re overwhelmed by the list of tasks that need your attention then you may want to check out our comprehensive guide to home maintenance. The tasks are organized by season, so scroll to the section for spring and start planning!
Spring cleaning after a long winter is no small task, but with the right tech, it doesn’t have to take over your weekends all season.
Editor’s note: This content was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for accuracy.
Disclaimer: These platforms are being provided for informational purposes only. Kin does not have a relationship with these platforms nor provides an endorsement or approval of these services.
