Preparing Your Home for Vacation: 6 Simple Tips

While you're preparing for your vacation and double-checking your bags, you should also prepare your house.

Before traveling for holidays, there are a thousand things to keep in mind. It's easy to overlook house preparation when putting all your lipsticks and sunscreen in the bag.

Doing some small activities in advance may make such a difference when you return from vacation, from throwing out soon-to-expire foodstuffs to ensuring everything is secure and safe.

Here are six chores you should complete all around the house before departing on your next vacation.

1. Clean Up A Little

After a wonderful, peaceful trip, the last place you'll want to come to is a clean home. You may not need to thoroughly clean everything before leaving.

However, coming through the door of a filthy house after a long day of travel can shake you out of your relaxed state.

However, cleaning your house before going on vacation isn't simply for your sanity. It's also to keep things from going wrong, like fruit flies taking over in your absence. Scrub the sinks and toilets, vacuum, and discard or consume any fruits that are left out.

2. Cleaning out the fridge

Take a look inside the refrigerator while you're at it. Anything that could spoil while you're away should be eaten, frozen, or thrown away.

This one is rather self-explanatory. Nobody likes to come home to a refrigerator full of spoiled, nasty foodstuffs.

3. Take out the trash

To be fair, putting out the garbage is a necessary part of the cleaning process. So, if you are cleaning out your refrigerator, be sure to throw away the trash before you leave. If you wouldn't, you risk going home to a house full of foul odors.

To prevent arriving home with an unpleasant odor, clean the garbage disposal with ½ of water and vinegar.

4. Check the laundry twice

While quickly packing and cleaning the house, it's easy to ignore the obvious. For example, the final load of laundry you neglected to put in the dryer.

Check the washing before you leave. Coming home to a full load of sour laundry that has been sitting for a week is less than ideal.

5. Set your thermostat

Setting the digital thermostat to an away program is another option to save energy while on vacation. Many digital thermostats include a feature that will modify the temperature setting when you are not at home.

It will raise the temperature for cooling in the summer and drop the temperature for heating in the winter.

Just be prepared to wait for your house to cool down to a suitable temperature when you return. However, if you have a smart thermostat, you may turn off the away mode several hours before you return home and stroll into a nicely heated or cooled house.

6. Set timers for your lights

Setting timers for lights around the home is a simple way to dissuade break-ins. You may accomplish this in an old-fashioned manner by using analog outlet timers.

However, if you want to improve the impact, utilize smart lighting. Not only will you be able to control the lights remotely, but you will also be able to set them to a different schedule each day while you are away to better imitate someone being home. This way you can also control your LED grow lights to keep your plants growing while you’re away.

You may also go a step farther and put your entire home automation on vacation mode. Put a television or radio on a schedule using a smart plug. Not only can you have lights on a timer, but you could also keep the TV on for a few hours at night to make it even more believable.

Conclusion

No matter how regularly you travel, you'll undoubtedly have concerns regarding your house while you're away. There's a lot that can go wrong when you're gone from home, from robbery to plumbing problems.

However, there are certain things you can do to prepare your house for vacation in order to avoid problems like these.

Use the guidelines we have shared above for your next long vacation to prepare the house so you may feel more at ease leaving the house and having fun on your trip!