After Long Summer Days Outside — Here’s How to Keep All Types of Messes From Entering Your Home

Winter means coats and accessories strewn across your home. Back-to-school season means finding a place for the backpacks and making a cleanup routine for lunch boxes and water bottles. Spring brings muddy footprints tracked inside as tokens of April’s showers.

And then, of course, there’s summer. With so much (wonderful!) traffic between the outdoors and indoors, the fun-filled season comes with its own set of messes, particularly in the form of outdoor dirt and debris that finds its way into your home. 

Here are some ways to keep these messes to a minimum, so you can spend more time having fun and less time cleaning up after them.

Grass clippings from quickly-growing summer grass have a way of finding their way indoors — and it’s no wonder, especially if you have kids running through sprinklers. The best way to deal with this mess is to not stress about it when it happens. Instead, make it part of your summer routine to sweep the floor or run your robot vacuum (I love my Roborock). This way you know you’ll deal with the dead grass, but you aren’t fighting it all day. 

Running through sprinklers and lounging in the kiddie pool mean wet feet. When these feet run inside to go to the bathroom or to grab snacks or drinks, you’re left with wet and often dirty footprints all over the floor. To minimize mopping, set up old towels along the most-used routes. It’s so much easier to toss towels into the washing machine than to clean floors! 

Sand and summer fun go hand-in-hand. But cleaning it up is anything but enjoyable. It needs to be done, though. Besides the gritty feeling under your feet, sand can really scratch hardwood floors. To keep incoming sand at bay, have your kids take off their shoes before they come inside, wash sandy items (or shake them off) before bringing them into your home, and, again, make vacuuming, sweeping, or switching on that robot vacuum part of your summer routine. 

What is summer without afternoon popsicles and anytime watermelon? To keep sticky messes at bay, have your kids eat their treats outside, preferably on the grass, or in the bathtub! 

Swimsuits, wet towels, goggles, flip flops, diving toys, water bottles — summer activities come with a lot of gear that doesn’t necessarily have a designated spot once it’s in rotation. Rather than dealing with clutter that takes over the home, create places for these items. For instance, you could keep a stack of towels in a particular corner of your mudroom bench and assign a set of hooks in the guest bathroom for wet swimsuits. You could also maintain a fun summer bag and make that your designated spot.