Spring cleaning advice was written for places with snow and mud. This calendar follows the Phoenix year instead: dry heat, monsoon dust and rain, and a mild season spent outdoors.
Phoenix has seasons, just not the usual four. Using 1991 to 2020 normals from Phoenix Sky Harbor, the year breaks into a mild stretch from late fall to early spring, a dry and fiercely hot foresummer, the monsoon, and a long slide back to comfortable weather.
Each part of the year leaves its own mark on a house. This calendar lists what to focus on and when, so the big jobs land in the weeks when they will last.
Sky Harbor gets a normal 7.22 inches of rain a year. The two driest months are May, with 0.13 inches, and June, with just 0.02. July and August bring 0.91 and 0.93 inches, the wettest stretch of the summer. The normal July high is 106.5 degrees, about 111 days a year reach 100 or more, and freezing nights are rare enough that only nine years from 1991 to 2020 saw any.
The National Weather Service has treated June 15 through September 30 as the official Phoenix monsoon since 2008. The monsoon can bring dust storms, flash floods and hail, often on the same afternoon.
These are the months Phoenix lives outdoors. Patio doors stay ajar, guests visit for the holidays, and outdoor dust drifts in on every breeze. Focus inside on high traffic: entry floors, the kitchen, guest bathrooms and the sliding door tracks that collect grit from the patio.
With freezing temperatures so rare, there is no snow, salt or slush to fight. That makes mid winter a good time to tackle the indoor jobs that heat makes miserable later, such as washing baseboards and wiping blinds.
This is Phoenix's real spring cleaning window, before the long run of days at 100 degrees or more. It is the time for a One-Time Deep Clean if the home has not had one since the last monsoon, and for clearing closets and garages while working in them is still pleasant.
Ceiling fans deserve attention now. They are about to run constantly for months, and a blade coated with winter dust will spin it straight onto beds and counters.
The driest stretch of the Phoenix year. June averages two hundredths of an inch of rain, and relative humidity can sink to about 19 percent. Fine dust stays airborne and settles quickly on dark furniture, electronics and floors.
Nearly every Phoenix home has air conditioning, and from here on it will rarely rest. Keep vents and returns dusted so the cooled air is not carrying dust back into the room, and keep doors closed in the heat of the day.
When storms build, thunderstorm outflow can drive haboobs, walls of dust, across the desert. After a storm, expect a gritty film on window sills, patio furniture and the floor just inside every door. When dew points climb above 70 degrees, entryways and bathrooms stay damp longer than Phoenix residents are used to.
Keep entry mats outside and inside every exterior door, shake them after each storm, and keep recurring visits steady rather than skipping them. A missed visit after a dust storm means the next one starts from twice the grit.
Once the monsoon ends, the house holds a summer's worth of dust in window tracks, vents and fan blades. This is the second deep clean window of the year, and for many households the most useful one, because it sets the home up for the holiday months.
Late summer and fall is also when canal algae can give Phoenix tap water a musty taste and odor, according to the city. It is a water supply issue, not a cleaning one, but it is a good reason to rinse and dry sink basins and kettles more often in these months.
The questions Phoenix homeowners ask most often about this topic, answered plainly.
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