Fall is the time you start spending the most hours indoors. That’s why it’s important to implement fall cleaning. But tidying up your home can be challenging, especially if you don’t know where to start. 

Fortunately, we’ve prepared a simple fall cleaning checklist for you. 

Shampoo your carpet

With the beginning of the fall season, you can start your cleaning by scrubbing your carpet. You can rent a carpet cleaner, or decide to save some bucks by implementing popular DIY cleaning tricks. 

Clean all windows

For the best results, use glass cleaners or dishwashing liquid. Fill a spray bottle with clean water and add a few squirts of the dishwasher liquid. Gently wipe the windows using a clean microfiber cloth. Washing your windows on a cloudy day can help you spot the streaks easily. 

Clean bedding and curtains

Even though you might replace your beddings regularly, your bed might still be home to a lot of dust and dirt thanks to your unchanged mattress. And it’s not only dirt that might be a challenge to you – bedbugs might also set up shop in your beloved bed, threatening your peaceful night sleeps. Cleaning your mattress regularly can help you get rid of the dirt and bed bugs. 

A vacuum cleaner allows you to cleanse your mattress thoroughly. Steam cleaners do an even better job, considering they eliminate 99% of germs. The heat from the steam cleaner get rids of bedbugs and their eggs on your mattress. Better yet, the tool doesn’t release any chemicals, meaning you won’t be at risk of consuming any harmful products.

The steam cleaner can also come in handy when you’re cleansing furniture and curtains. It gives such surfaces a thorough clean.

Freshening up the bathroom 

Your bathroom should always be tidy, regardless of the season. Given it’s the room that gets you ready for the day, the bathroom needs a thorough and deep cleaning. Ensure you’ve cleaned the toilet, counters, and sink, and wipe the walls thoroughly. 

You can use a disinfected toilet brush to get rid of all the stains quickly. Also, regularly replace the towels, using the older towel to wipe your toilet’s sink. 

Organize the garage

The garage is one of the most difficult places to clean, so most homeowners put it aside, promising to declutter it one day. When you realize your car doesn’t even fit well anymore in your cluttered garage space, then it’s time to tidy up. 

To ensure the cleaning process is as smooth as possible, note all your garage’s belongings, taking into account how you’d like to carry out the cleaning. You can decide to give some things you no longer use away – it will help in creating some space. 

Use a wet-dry vacuum to remove dust and install any bins. You can then put away any of the stuff you’re considering keeping. 

Deep cleaning your garage can take a few days, but after you’re done, you’ll be surprised how easy it will be to clean the space afterward. 

Book a cleaning with us 

Having a tidy home, clear of any clutter, requires a lot of long hours. Illinois Valley Clean Team can help you clean every inch of your home, leaving you with a house you can be proud of. You can call us today and we can arrange a date and time for our visit.

After the holidays, usually comes the guilt. All you want to do is lose the gained weight and recover your healthy style of life. Well, that’s why we gather for you eight healthy new year tips for you to return to shape in less time. Keep reading to discover this post-holiday detox plan.

Drink lots of water

Water is the natural fuel that flows through your body. Water helps you release toxins, and regulates other critical processes inside you, like the weight you gained during the holidays. Drink enough water in January, and your body will recover its balance. Also, you are probably slightly dehydrated because of all the alcohol you drank at Christmas.

Embrace the liquid food

When you’re recovering from the holidays excess, the best thing you can do is avoiding any unnecessary calories. One useful hack to do this is eating a liquid lunch like soup. A bowl of yummy hot soup is an excellent dinner option that will make you feel light when you go to bed.

Don’t skip breakfast

Many people who want to lose weight make this mistake. Skipping breakfast usually backfires because it produces over/eating later. Also, your body should eat at specific times, without letting too much time between meals. This will help your body regain its balance and rhythm, and your metabolism will work better.

Eat light at night

You will rest better if you eat light at night. Your body needs proper rest to recover from the holidays. In fact, the human body burns calories while it sleeps, so this is another great reason to sleep well.

Grant yourself a mocktail

Your stomach and liver probably are worn out after the holidays. Give a break to alcohol and sweet drinks and embrace the herbal teas. Sparkling water, green tea, or pomegranate juice will do the trick. Detox your body with these natural beverages, and in a couple of weeks, you’ll feel good as new.

Say no to calorie bombs

Do you have pie or candy leftovers? Give that food away and fill up your fridge with healthy food and light snacks. Even if you love that cheesecake, it’s better to avoid that risk and let someone else enjoy that calorie bomb. When you remove the temptation, the process becomes much easier.

Move does muscles

Of course, no detox plan is complete without good-old-exercise. You need to regain your body’s strength. Lift some weights, hit the ground running, or do some squats and abs for a change. Exercise will free you from stress and will give you a good night’s sleep.

Respect your bedtime

Last but not least, don’t forget to sleep seven or eight hours a day. Depriving your body of rest doesn’t do any good and usually causes quite the opposite. When you sleep, you also burn calories and regain balance through breathing. Like gym lovers say: eat, sleep, repeat.
We hope you recover your shape in no time! And don’t worry about your kitchen, if our fridge is all messy after the holidays and your cabinets are all grease and sticky, we can do for you a deep house cleaning. Contact us on our website.

It won’t be long before you start feeling that crisp chill in the air, signaling that fall has arrived once again! For us, that means warm desserts, comforting nights wrapped in a blanket, and pumpkin spice in everything. It also means a lot of work for people who love their garden, and it’s essential that if you are one of them, you remember these chores to get it ready for fall (and then winter).

We’ll give you three fall garden care tips and two for winter. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner trying to make your garden survive another season, or a consummate professional looking for a new perspective on things, this list will help you for sure!

Fall Tips

1. Prepare a new garden bed for spring

Garden soil care during fall is important, and it’s never too early to start thinking about the following spring and preparing a new garden bed before the cold season will bring you great results as soon as the weather is warm again. What you need to do is take laying down a thick cardboard/newspaper layer, topped off with a 5-inch thick layer of compost, then adding a layer of woodchip mulch of about 4 inches thick. The idea is letting this new bed stay sitting over the winter, so it’s ready to plant by spring. 

While you can accomplish pretty much the same results applying only the mulch over the cardboard or newspaper, it’s better if you already have access to enough compost to add it to the new bed. The same goes for preparing raised beds for winter.

2. Pull out dead plants and remove diseased ones

Any plant that didn’t survive the season has to be removed, and while doing so might be sad considering you planted them only a few months ago, they can still be useful if you add them to your compost pile. It all goes back to the earth! Another critical step is to trim back your perennials that are dormant, cutting the dead stems if they still have green leaves.

On the other hand, you must remove all diseased plants from your garden before the disease can spread to other plants by overwintering, even if you think they won’t survive the cold. This is a common mistake of novice or amateur gardeners, so now you know how to avoid it! Dispose of them by burning or taking them to a landfill in a bag, because composting them might cause the disease to be passed back into your garden.

3. Protect young trees from wind and critters

Fall and winter are seasons full of dangers for recently planted young trees. Fall brings along fast winds that can knock your sapling back and forth and thus break their roots, so it’s a good idea to tie them to a strong stake firmly planted in the ground. If you’re going to use wire to tie your tree, remember to cover the wire with pieces from an old hose to prevent it from cutting into the bark.

Speaking of barks; the colder seasons also bring some critters that love to munch on the bark of your trees, like the rabbit, so using some vinyl tree wrap around your sapling will protect it from them. You can also use a special breathable fabric if you want the tree to heal an already existing wound.

Winter Tips

If you did all your fall preparations right, that means there isn’t much to do in the garden, plant-wise. However, there are a couple of things you can take care of in the meantime.

1. Repair your garden structures

The reduced foliage and trimmed shrubs mean that you now have more moving space to do some maintenance work on your tool shed, greenhouse, fences, and summer house if you have them. It’s the time to repair or replace damaged timber, or parts that are suffering from pest infestations or weather damage. That way they’ll look gorgeous once the sun shines again when spring arrives. If you have a summerhouse, you can have it cleaned as well.

2. Clean and store your gardening tools

While some of them, like clippers, are always useful to have at hand, you won’t have too much use for the rest until the next gardening season. If you already finished preparing for autumn, this an excellent time to clean, treat, and store all your tools in the shed, covering them to prevent humidity do some damage. Making some racks to hold them is also a good idea if you don’t have a proper space for each one in the shed to avoid cluttering.

Any parent can tell you that having your kids home after school and having them around all day for summer vacation are two very different things. Children tend to get into all sorts of trouble if they’re idle for too long, and while you can handle them pretty well, your house might not be as well-prepared for it as you might think. Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to protect it, and give your kids something to do in the meantime.

The following tips are all about getting your house ready for your kids’ summer vacation by planning a lot of different activities and stocking up on materials to keep them occupied, but also by dropping a few chores on their hands so they can help around the house; after all, it’s not like you are the one with a summer vacation, right? Although, when it comes to chores, maybe you can get a summer break too.

Here’s how you can prepare your house for your kids’ summer vacation.

Get an inflatable pool for the backyard

If you have enough space in your backyard, you can save yourself many trips to wherever pools are in your town with a family-sized blow-up pool. You might think that setting one up would prove expensive enough for it to be completely out of the question, but if you factor in the convenience of making your pool parties right at home, and the sheer joy that it would bring your kids all over the summer, the thing pretty much pays for itself. If you go through with it, remember to set some rules for your children, such as only using the pool when under supervision, when it is OK for them to get in, and to finish their chores before getting in, just to name a few.

Stock up on new age-appropriate books

Does every fun summer activity around the house has to be outdoors? Not at all, especially on those days where it’s just so hot that going outside just sounds like a terrible, terrible idea! Instead, get some books that you know your kids will enjoy before the summer begins, and whip them out at least once a week over their vacation. You can also set up a cozy Bookworm Corner in your living room by cranking up the air conditioner, spreading a couple of blankets on the floor and maybe a few pillows, then letting them get lost on a good story.

Make a little chore-chart

No matter how many activities you plan for them, there will be times when your kids get idle for a little longer than they should, and that’s why you should always have a chart where all their chores are assigned for the whole duration of the summer. The chart will help them learn that house maintenance is not something to be done as a punishment or obligation, but that it’s a part of everyday life that shouldn’t be ignored, even on vacations. You can schedule a few big ones to do as a family so you can drive this point home, while also spending some time with them in a different context than usual.

Load up regularly on healthy snacks

Kids being around the house all day means that your fridge will be raided constantly, but you can always be one step ahead of them by preparing your home for long a vacation! A quick trip to the grocery store per week should let you stock up on healthy, fat-free and low-sugar snacks that your kids can either have as a daily snack or as a treat after helping you with cleaning chores. Otherwise, they might get their hands on some food they’re not supposed to be having and even potentially ruining a midweek dinner plan. If you choose to buy fruit, prepare it in a fun and creative way, such as cutting it into novelty shapes or mixing them with peanut butter (apple slices and peanut butter are always a hit).

Condition some space for physical activities

Like we’ve been saying throughout the article, children should remain active during their summer vacation, but you probably can’t spare every single day to go on an adventure with them. What you can do instead is prepare a room (or the backyard) for them to play and stay active in a safe manner. This means taking out anything they could hurt themselves with, such as a big piece of furniture they could bump into or a rug they could trip with. If you don’t have enough space for them to play, how about setting up a light exercise routine they could do alongside you? It’s a perfect way to bond with them and stay healthy yourself!

Always remember that summer vacation is a very special moment in the life of every child and that they won’t have it forever. On top of every chore, routine, and rules that you set up for this coming summer in your household, remember always to keep it fun and lighthearted for them; that’s what preparing your home for a summer vacation is all about. They’ll thank you for it once they grow up!