Preparing Your Alaska Home for Winter: Essential Cleaning Tips

There is a short window each autumn when it is still worth opening the windows, and then there is not. Everything useful you can do to an Alaska house before winter happens inside that window.

The reason is simple enough. From freeze-up until breakup, the house is a closed box. Whatever is inside it in October is what you will be breathing in February, moved around by the heating system and settling on everything. This is not about appearances — a house in the dark months is a house you are inside almost all the time.

Start at the door

The arctic entry does more work than any other part of the house between October and April, and it is the easiest place to make the whole winter better.

• Clear it out completely — summer gear away, winter gear in
• Wash the floor properly now, while the grit is dry rather than wet
• Scrub the walls at boot height, where the spatter is
• Put down a boot tray with a lip, not a flat mat — meltwater has to go somewhere
• Two mats, not one: coarse outside to take grit, absorbent inside to take water
• Check the weather stripping on the outer door while you can still see daylight through a gap

Every kilogram of grit stopped at the door is grit that is not being ground into your floors for the next six months. There is no cleaning task in an Alaska house with a better return.

The heat source

If you burn wood or pellets, the stove and its surroundings need doing before the season, not during it.

• Ash removed and disposed of in a metal container with a lid, kept off anything combustible
• Glass cleaned — it is much harder once a season of creosote has baked onto it
• Hearth and the floor around it washed
• The wall above the stove checked for soot staining
• The area where wood is stacked indoors swept out — bark, splinters and whatever came in with the wood

For forced-air systems, the equivalent is the filter and the registers. Replace the filter, vacuum the supply and return vents, and move furniture off anything that has drifted in front of a register over the summer.

Windows, and the reason they matter more here

In most places cleaning windows before winter is cosmetic. In Southcentral Alaska it is practical, for two reasons.

The first is light. By December you are working with a handful of usable hours, and a dirty pane measurably cuts what gets through. It sounds marginal. In a Valley winter it is not.

The second is condensation. A sealed, heated house with people in it produces a lot of moisture, and it finds the coldest surface, which is the glass. Dirty sills and tracks hold that water against the frame, and over a season that is where mould starts.

• Interior glass washed
• Sills washed and dried
• Tracks vacuumed out and wiped — this is the part that matters
• Weep holes at the bottom of the frame checked and cleared
• Any existing mould on the frame dealt with now, not in March

Textiles and the dust question

A closed house recirculates. Anything soft is both a reservoir and a source:

• Rugs and runners washed or taken outside and beaten while it is still dry
• Upholstery vacuumed, including under the cushions
• Curtains washed or aired — especially in rooms with a stove
• Bedding laundered and winter bedding aired before it goes on
• Vacuum filter cleaned or replaced, which people almost never do and which quietly halves the machine's usefulness

Safety things to do at the same time

Not cleaning, but the same afternoon, and the right afternoon for it:

• Test every smoke alarm and carbon monoxide alarm and change batteries per the manufacturer's instructions. CO risk goes up in winter for exactly the reasons this article is about: combustion heating in a sealed house.
• Check that alarms are not past their replacement date — they do expire, and the date is printed on the back.
• Clear the area around any heater, and keep it clear once the clutter of winter arrives.
• Make sure the dryer vent is clear and that its outside termination is not going to be buried by the first serious snow.

A once-a-year deep clean, if you do one

If your household does a single deep clean a year, this is a better moment for it than spring. Spring cleaning is traditional, but it comes after the months you spend indoors. Doing it in October means the house is at its best during the stretch when you are actually living in it, and it clears out the heating season's starting conditions rather than its aftermath.

What that adds over the list above: inside the oven and refrigerator, behind appliances, cabinet fronts, baseboards, light fixtures and the shower scale. The difference between the two jobs is set out in deep cleaning versus regular cleaning.

If you would rather not

It is a weekend of work for most households, and the autumn weekends are not numerous. We do seasonal deep cleans as a one-off visit and recurring cleaning through the winter, in Wasilla, Palmer, Eagle River and Anchorage.

Current pricing is on the services page, and a quote for your own home is free — tell us about the house and we will tell you what it needs, including when the honest answer is that it does not need much.

Common questions