It's time for fall cleaning, y'all.

Major cleaning isn't a once a year event taking place in the spring.  After a summer spent bringing the
outdoors in and before you close yourself in with your dirt for the winter, you need to clean things.

• If you have outdoor furniture, clean it and store it.
• If necessary, switch out screens for storm windows.
• Get winter coats and other heavy clothes out of storage.  If you have kids, see if coats and boots still fit.
• Before you store your summer clothes, make sure they fit and are clean and in good repair. Why find space for something that you can no longer use?
• Clean vents and have your furnace serviced if needed.
• Flip mattresses.  Consider switching to winter weight bed coverings.
• Clean windows and launder or dry clean curtains as necessary.
• Clean carpets and rugs.
• Do a general uncluttering.  Get rid of things that are broken or rarely used.
• Do through medicine cabinets and discard old cosmetics.  Take expired medications to a pharmacy for safe disposal. (Do NOT flush them.  It's bad for the water table.)

Basically, it's time to do all those annoying cleaning chores you like to put off.  If you are especially ambitious this year, let me know in the comments and I’ll post my list of cleaning tasks for a thorough house-cleaning.