Prevent Pollutants from Invading Your Home

In order to keep your home clean and your family healthier-especially when it comes to allergies or asthma-it's crucial to develop strategies that prevent outdoor pollutants from invading your space. Use the following ideas to help your entryway work harder at keeping pollutants at bay.

A doormat outside your front door is a great first line of defense for excess dirt and grime that can end up on people's shoes, but having a mat or rug on the inside of the door is a good idea as well. This second mat will help catch any extra moisture or bacteria that wasn't wiped off on the first one. Just make sure you're washing your indoor mat once a week to keep it working effectively.

Taking off your shoes before coming inside isn't just polite, it's also health-conscious. The soles of your shoes are a huge source of transferring pollutants and bacteria into your home-including Clostridium difficile spores, which can cause inflammation of the colon*.

To play it safe, make your home a shoe-free space. All you need to do to make it easy for you and your guests to go shoe-free is place a shoe rack by the entryway. You'll have an automatic place to store those dirt-trackers before stepping fully inside your home.

Pets enrich our lives in so many ways, but they also carry tons of germs and bacteria into our homes. Hang a towel on a coatrack near your entryway that you can use to wipe your pup's paws clean before he comes inside. And of course, be sure to wash the towel weekly so it continues to be an efficient way to manage canine-related germs.

Especially during cold and flu season, keep some hand sanitizer by your entryway so your family can say goodbye to bacteria before coming inside. We all touch so many germ-infested surfaces on a day-to-day basis, and after a long day it's best to clean your hands before coming in contact with different items in your home.

* Anaerobe