Before you close up the house

Before you close up the house

Fall in Denver means two small changes happen almost at once: the furnace turns on and the windows close for the season. Both quietly change how your home collects dust and moisture. Two quick things to do before that happens, both worth about ten minutes each.

Clean your vents before the first furnace run

All summer, dust settles on your floor registers and a few inches down into the ducts. Nothing moves it because the heat isn't running. Then one cold morning the furnace turns on, and everything sitting in there gets pushed out into every room at once. That's also where the burning smell on the first cold day comes from: dust cooking off the heating parts.

Before the first cold snap, lift the register covers, vacuum as far into the opening as your hose reaches, and wipe the covers down before putting them back. Do the large return grille too, and swap the furnace filter while you're at it. It's a short job that saves you a week of dust landing on freshly cleaned surfaces.

Give your windows a reset before you shut them

Once the windows close, the moisture from showers, cooking and even breathing has fewer ways out. On cold mornings it shows up as condensation along the bottom of the glass, and it drips straight into the window tracks, where a summer's worth of dust, pollen and bug debris is already sitting. Moisture plus grit is how those tracks turn into black, sticky grime by spring.

So before you close them for the season, vacuum the tracks, wipe them with a damp cloth, and let them dry fully. Then give your bathroom fan an extra 15 to 20 minutes after each shower to make up for the open window you no longer have. Cleaner tracks now means no scrubbing mildew out of corners in March.