(ARA) – Who doesn’t love spring, with the fresh breezes and the bright sunlight? Warm weather arrives to signal a new beginning. Inside the home, spring cleaning is a fresh start as well.

Nearly everyone can appreciate polished surfaces and tidy rooms, but spring cleaning has other benefits. Spring cleaning can also help deal with allergens and pests in your home. Many people are aware of allergens like dust, pollen, mold, mildew and animal dander, especially in the spring, but some sources of these are often less obvious.

Just a few simple steps added to your spring cleaning every year can help you to enjoy your home.

Filter it out

Regularly changing your furnace filters can greatly reduce allergens that are air-borne throughout your home. A furnace filter can remove some of those unseen dusts and allergens. Replacing filters at least every six months helps improve the efficiency of your furnace as well.

Beds are important

Washing your bedding regularly is not enough to prevent allergens from lurking in beds. In addition to turning and flipping mattresses two to three times a year, pillows should be replaced every one to two years and mattresses every five to 10 years. The life of these items can be extended by the use of simple, inexpensive mattress and pillow covers that are allergen free. These will trap allergy-triggering dust mites and reduce the contact with the allergens trapped in your pillow or mattress. Perhaps the most important advice for allergy sufferers is to keep pets off the bed and out of the bedroom altogether.

Rodents

Rodents, like mice and rats, are often overlooked, but may have moved into our homes without detection and can produce allergens from droppings and hair follicles. What’s more, rodents are known disease carriers, so controlling them in your home is important. Even if you don’t think you have a mouse problem, you may. A recent government study found that four out of five American homes have detectable levels of mouse allergen.

If you find that mice have entered your home, choose an effective mouse trap like Ortho Home Defense MAX Kill and Contain Mouse Trap. This trap won’t snap fingers or paws, so it’s safe for use around children and pets, and it traps the dead mouse inside where you never have to touch it.

Rodents will be less likely to enter your home if there is no available food, so it is important to remove any potential food sources. Store anything that could be considered food to pests in airtight containers including; dog and cat food, bird seed, grass seed, breads and cereals.

Insects

Insects can leave their feces, saliva and exoskeletons in your home. For every one insect you actually see, hundreds more are likely hidden in spots where you can’t see them.

As with rodents, the best way to keep insects from entering your home is to be sure your house is properly sealed to keep them out. Use weather stripping over visible cracks and gaps along doors or windows and use expanding foam insulation to fill any other openings around the foundation of your home.

To defend your home inside and out from bugs and to prevent more from coming in, you’ll need to use an insect spray like Ortho Home Defense MAX Perimeter and Indoor Insect Killer. Simply spray around your baseboards indoors and your house’s outside perimeter to prevent bugs from invading your home. People and pets can re-enter sprayed areas after the spray has dried. This non-staining, odor-free spray kills bugs and also controls certain listed bugs for up to 12 months indoors; including crickets, spiders, carpet beetles, earwigs, firebrats, moths and silverfish.

Spring can mean a clean, fresh start for your home with just these few simple steps added to your spring cleaning every year.  More importantly, taking care of unwanted pests and allergens in your home now will leave you to enjoy your home for months to come.

Courtesy of ARAcontent

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Tags: house cleaning, how-to, Kitchen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under All House, Quick Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.