8 Easy Solutions to Make Your Home Less Dusty

While it's hard to prove, it's widely believed that about half of the dirt and dust in your home enters through your shoes and boots. Put mats on each exterior door, one outside and one inside, to be extra careful. Shake them out in front of open windows and wash or hose them down regularly.

If you allow the air in your home to get too dry, you'll create more dust. Skin, fabrics, plants - everything dries out and produces more dust when it's dry. You can increase humidity with a plug-in humidifier or a whole-house unit on your forced-air furnace. Running water in the bathtub or shower, boiling water in a tea kettle, and air drying clothes also add moisture to the air. Experts recommend aiming for an indoor humidity level of 30% to 50%.

You do not even want to know how much dust lurks in carpets and rugs. Even if you vacuum and shake out carpets regularly, the dust will remain trapped inside until someone walks or rolls on it, and then the dust will become airborne. Some of it gets trapped in the carpet, and some of it ends up on your horizontal surfaces. If you have to buy a carpet, be warned that wool carpets fall off like crazy.

Exhaust grilles, especially in bathrooms, collect a lot of dust. If they are easy to remove, you can clean them easily by placing them in the top rack of the dishwasher and running them through. If you can not easily remove the dusty rack, use a damp cloth and cotton swabs to remove the dust. Vacuuming also works, but make sure your vacuum does not blow the dirt right back into the air.

You know how much you love your cozy bed? Unfortunately, dust mites love it just as much. Without putting too fine a point on it, the reason our bedrooms are so dusty is because we shed a lot of dead skin there (dust), and therefore dust mites live there too (more dust). Bedding, including pillows and blankets, needs to be cleaned frequently to keep the dust from piling up.

If you have a forced-air air conditioner, you should put changing the filter on your monthly to-do list. It's simple and takes very little time, but it will help you a lot with dust control.
So, you change your furnace filter every month. Now check out this definitive guide on how often you should clean everything else.

All blinds, shades, and curtains trap a lot of dust. And why? Because they have so much surface area. You can dust your blinds slat by slat, or take them off their mounts and wash them or have them professionally cleaned. Dusty blinds can usually be wiped down with a damp cloth. And curtains can be washed or professionally cleaned, depending on what they are made of.

If you have crossed the line into being a previous tenant, it's high time you got rid of a whole bunch of stuff. All those knick-knacks, knick-knacks and knick-knacks are collecting dust. If you do not plan to keep them scrupulously clean, they will contribute to your dust problem. If you can not part with some treasures, at least put them in a box and rotate the items you display at any given time. That way, you'll have fewer things to dust and there will be less dust in your home.