How a tidy home protects seniors’ independence.
Raise your hand if you’re in the middle of your annual spring-cleaning marathon. Even in Bradenton, where tropical winters mean we rarely get trapped inside by a snowstorm, spring cleaning is still a helpful ritual. We move furniture to dust and vacuum, sort paperwork and throw out loads of old mail, box up clutter, tidy up our belongings, and overall make our homes a little less chaotic.
It’s a satisfying routine. But for seniors, it can be a lifeline.
Cleaning and decluttering are 100% rewarding and even fun activities for seniors, especially when they double as a social activity done with a home companion. But even beyond the joy and satisfaction of a neat, well-organized house, spring cleaning is an opportunity to remove trip hazards and make small home modifications that greatly reduce the risk of a life-changing fall.
Home companions help by encouraging cleaning, assisting along the way, providing support and social connection during chores, overseeing safety for their clients, and ensuring that specific hazards are dealt with properly.
Reducing Fall Hazards Through Spring Cleaning
A messy house is risky business. As we age, we lose many of the tools we need for balance, including strength, flexibility, eyesight, and even inner-ear function. While we can work on each of those things directly, it’s also important to facilitate safety in our homes. Spring cleaning can take care of many fall risks all at once.
Cleaning helps people look specifically to address loose items on the floor, smaller items that need to be removed from pathways, rugs and floorboards that don’t lay flat, and other items that can create falls. Clients and their home companions can go room by room through the home, making the necessary changes both to clean and improve safety. (It also helps to have another body on hand for lifting heavy boxes, climbing stepladders and reaching higher shelves.)
Not only does it help to create a whole, intentional project to address such things directly; it also helps to address them as a “cleaning” project, rather than as something that focuses on age and physical condition.
Social Interaction and Companionship During Spring Cleaning
How often are your cleaning projects sidetracked because you discover a photograph or an old trinket and find yourself wandering down memory lane? Our elderly friends and family members have likely surrounded themselves with a lifetime’s worth of memories. If they discover them on their own, these memories can bring a bitter-sweet combination of nostalgia and loneliness.
Having a home companion present during spring cleaning allows seniors to share their memories, tell their stories, and create new, happy memories that they can take pride in creating.
The Satisfaction of a Clean Home
For any adult, a feeling of autonomy and productivity can be hard to come by. Doubly so for seniors, who might focus on the abilities they’ve lost rather than the things they can accomplish. This is a dangerous and self-fulfilling mindset that can spiral.
With the encouragement and assistance of a home companion, spring cleaning becomes not an overwhelming task, but a joyful exercise that yields real results. At the end of the day—or the week, or the season—they’re left with a house they can be proud of, and the knowledge that they helped to make it that way.
Bradenton Home Companions are Here for Spring Cleaning
Never underestimate the accountability of having another person along for the ride. Home companions help seniors achieve cleaner, safer homes and healthier, happier mindsets. It’s beautiful what we can achieve when we work together with our wonderful clients.