Winter fades into spring, and with it a desire to open the windows, get outside and clean and freshen our homes. There are a number of ways to spend less money — and even make a little money — during the spring cleaning process. Here are six good strategies my family uses at our house.

Clean the refrigerator coils. Almost every refrigerator gradually builds up a thick layer of dust on the rear coils. Refrigerator use tends to pull that dust in over time. As it builds, it can actually disrupt the effectiveness of cooling, making your refrigerator run less efficiently and gobble up more energy, which will have a direct impact on your energy bill.

You can take care of that by gently cleaning the dust from the coils. Yes, it does involve moving your refrigerator a bit so you have access to the back, but it’s a doable task with a little bit of help. A vacuum can easily remove the dust from the coils, or you can remove it by hand or with other cleaning devices depending on what’s convenient for you.

Collect all of the stuff you haven’t used since last year’s spring cleaning … and get rid of it. Most of us end up saving at least some things we don’t really need. We hold onto items for nostalgic reasons or because we believe we’ll find a use for those items down the road. The problem is that a lot of those items just become clutter — they sit there unused, gathering dust.

Don’t let that happen. The best strategy I’ve found is to simply get rid of everything I haven’t used since the last spring cleaning. If I haven’t touched an item in a year, I really have no reason to keep it around. This usually means several big bags of trash, but it also can mean a little bit of profit. Which brings us to …

Sell anything you don’t want on Craigslist, or save it for a yard sale. While many items we don’t keep after a year of nonuse are simply trash, a significant number actually have value to others. You should take advantage of that value before simply getting rid of those items.

The easiest way to do that is to use Craigslist, posting a list of items for sale with reasonable prices. You should always include that you’re willing to negotiate offers on the items because the goal is to clear out this stuff — not to keep listing it, hoping someone will pay you $2 more for an item. Any money you can make from items you were intending to get rid of is a bonus.

Make your own cleaning solutions. When you’re scrubbing down surfaces, windows, floors and other parts of your house, it’s inevitable that you’ll need to buy some cleaning supplies. At our house, we just pull out a bottle of all-purpose cleaner from the pantry, which works for almost everything. Not only that, we make it from just a few ingredients, which we buy at the store in large containers, reducing the overall cost of a cleaner down to a few cents .

You can do this, too. Take a spray bottle that holds about 2 cups of liquid. Add 1 teaspoon of castile soap, 1 teaspoon of borax and half a teaspoon of washing soda. Then fill up the bottle with warm water, and mix it gently until thoroughly combined. This stuff cleans everything from windows to tabletops really well. Not only that, you can get enough castile soap, borax, and washing soda to make dozens of bottles for about $7 at your local grocery store, and those ingredients last forever in the closet.

Use charcoal briquettes to eliminate odors. If you have any odd odors in your house, one great way to get rid of them is to simply go out in the garage, dig into your bag of charcoal, take one briquette and stow it near where you smell the odor. Charcoal naturally eliminates odor.

The only catch is you shouldn’t do this with charcoal that has lighter fluid already soaked in, as you’ll start smelling that lighter fluid everywhere.

There’s another little exception to the charcoal trick: the garbage disposal. Here’s a better strategy for eliminating those odors …

Clean your garbage disposal with lemon cubes. Whenever you use a lemon, tear up the peel and put it into several slots in an ice cube tray. Then fill each slot with vinegar. Pop that tray in the freezer. When the cubes are frozen, take one and drop it in your garbage disposal and run it.

The lemon peel and the vinegar do a great job eliminating odor, and you won’t have any cleanup, either. For bad odors, do this a few times. It’s a great way to reuse lemon peels and utilize the inexpensive cleaning power of vinegar.

There are lots of little strategies for saving money (and even earning a little) during spring cleaning. These techniques just scratch the surface, but they do provide a nice starting point for frugal cleaning.

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6 Smart Money-Saving Strategies for Spring Cleaning originally appeared on usnews.com