When it comes to prepping for vacation, booking the trip and packing your bags are only the initial steps. Organizing your home before leaving for you trip will assure you a pleasant welcome after vacation. Read about the 9 ways to prep you home before leaving for vacation in this C|Net article by Taylor Martin.
Getting ready for a vacation can be very stressful. What feels like a million different things have to be taken care of and organized so you can have a few days of relaxation in a place you only get to go once per year … if you’re lucky.
Aside from packing and quadruple-checking your luggage, here are nine things you should do around the house before you leave on your next vacation.
Clean
The last thing you’ll want to come home to after a nice, relaxing vacation is a dirty home. You might not need to deep clean everything before you leave. But walking through the door to a dirty house after a long day of travel will rip you out of relaxation mode.
That said, cleaning your home before vacation isn’t just for your own sanity. It’s also to help prevent things from going awry, such as fruit flies taking over in your absence. Scrub the sinks and toilets, vacuum and toss or eat any fruits sitting out.
Clean out the refrigerator
While you’re at it, take a peek inside your refrigerator. Freeze, eat or toss anything that will spoil while you’re gone. This is pretty self-explanatory. No one wants to come home to a fridge full of rotten, stinky foods.
Take out the trash
To be fair, taking out the trash is part of cleaning. However, if you clean out your refrigerator, it’s worth reiterating that you should definitely make sure to take out the garbage before you leave. If you don’t, you run the risk of coming home to all sorts of rancid smells and pests galore.
Double-check the laundry
While frantically running around packing and cleaning the house, it’s easy to forget the obvious things. That last load of laundry you forgot to put in the dryer, for instance.
Before you leave, check the washer. Coming home to a full load of laundry that has had a week to sit and sour is less than ideal, to say the least.
Take precautions for fire
Before you leave, make sure to unplug electronics around the house that don’t need power while you’re gone. Not only will it save you on your energy bill, it will lower the risk of an electrical fire. Unplug things like routers, televisions , computers or unused chargers.
Program your thermostat
Another way to save on energy while you’re on vacation is setting the thermostat to an away program. Many newer thermostats — especially smart ones — offer a feature like this that will adjust the temperature setting when you’re not home. In the summer, it will raise the temperature for cooling and, in the winter, it will lower the temperature for heating.
Just be ready to wait for your home to return to a comfortable temperature when you return. That said, if you have a smart thermostat, you can disable the away mode hours before you arrive home and can walk into a perfectly cooled (or heated) house.
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