Make sure garage door seals and keep leaves outdoors

 This time of year, they invade your home. You find them everywhere: on the kitchen floor, on your rugs and carpet; upstairs and in the basement. LEAVES!!! How are they so successfully invasive? The answer is so simple. They hitchhike on your shoes. That means that they start outdoors. But the gateway where they have the most success is in your garage.

You pull the car into the garage and leaves come with you on your tires. Or the wind blows them in while the door is open. However, they get there, you step out of the car and they stick to your shoes. Then they let go when you’re inside the house. In fact, once they’re in the garage, you could run out to the garage to grab some dog food or something. When you go back into the house, you’ve got leaves tagging along.

It’s a nuisance in the house cleaning up all those leaves. That’s particularly the case after people have stepped on the leaves and ground them into the carpet or hardwood floor. 

Wet leaves pose a safety hazard

Leaves are also a safety hazard on hardened floors, such as the hardwood mentioned above, or the concrete in the garage. The leaves are frequently wet. You can easily slip on them and fall. In either case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Prevention means cleaning the leaves in your garage before they have a chance to hitch a ride into your house. It’s also important to clean the leaves from in front of the doors – the front door, the patio door and the garage door.

Of course, this time of year, no sooner do you clean the leaves up than Mother Nature puts more leaves down where you cleaned up the other leaves. You have to stay after the leaves. Keep a broom near the front door and the patio door. A leaf blower ready to go by the garage door will help.

You may also want to avoid leaving the garage door open for extended periods. The longer it is open, the more chance that leaves will blow in from outside.

It’s also important to make sure that your garage door closes completely. This means that you want to check the weather strip at the bottom of the garage door. Then you want to make sure the door is adjusted so it closes completely. It should come down far enough that the rubber weather strip seals against the floor.