How to keep floors, entries and stairs under control through a Pittsburgh winter, with about 44 inches of snow, a January mean below freezing and hillside walks that send grit into every house.
A Pittsburgh winter is long and gray. The city averages 44.1 inches of snow a season, with about 40 days bringing at least a tenth of an inch, and January's normal daily mean sits at 28.8 degrees. Add hills, hundreds of public stairways and plenty of homes without a garage, and you have a recipe for wet, gritty floors from early December until well into March.
This guide is about the inside of the house: what winter does to floors and air, how to set up the entry, and how a cleaning schedule should change once the first snow falls.
The city has 90 neighborhoods, and more than a quarter of their names refer to hills or heights. It also has about 800 sets of public stairways with 44,645 treads. Walking to a bus stop or a car often means a slope or a flight of steps, and every stride picks up slush and whatever was spread to keep the walk from freezing.
Parking adds to it. In Shadyside, most houses lack garages, and in many row houses the front door leads straight from the sidewalk into the living space. With no garage or mudroom to shed boots in, the first room of the house becomes the mudroom.
A few changes at the door save a lot of floor cleaning:
Pittsburgh gets about 45 percent of possible sunshine across a year, and winter is the grayest part of it. Windows stay shut, radiators and furnaces run for months, and dust settles on every flat surface. The Allegheny County Health Department calls air quality one of the area's most pressing public health challenges, and in a sealed winter house the fine dust has nowhere to go.
Dust radiator tops and fins while the heat is low, change furnace filters on schedule, and wipe window sills often. Condensation on cold glass can leave water marks on sills and painted trim, so a quick wipe each morning during cold snaps protects the paint.
With about 46.6 percent of city homes built in 1939 or earlier, many winter houses here are drafty ones. Older sashes let in cold air and fine dust, and painted sills take the brunt of condensation. The EPA notes that homes built before 1978 are more likely to have lead paint, and where it is chipping it advises HEPA vacuums and no dry sweeping. In winter, when the house is closed up, that advice matters even more.
See the older home cleaning guide for radiators, plaster and old tile.
Many households that do fine on monthly visits in summer find they fall behind by January. Switching to bi-weekly from December through March keeps the entry, kitchen floor and stairs from building up between visits. Big households with pets may want weekly visits in the snowiest weeks.
Between visits, a five minute habit goes a long way: run a dry mop over the entry each evening during snowy weeks, empty the boot tray before it overflows, and hang wet coats where they can drip onto a mat instead of the floor.
Every Recurring House Clean dusts reachable baseboards and blind slats, which is where winter dust collects first. The recurring cleaning guide covers how to choose a frequency, and the seasonal calendar shows the rest of the year.
The questions Pittsburgh homeowners ask most often about this topic, answered plainly.
TotalCare Cleaning will service Pittsburgh and surrounding areas with background-checked cleaners and is insured up to $1 million. Re-clean guarantee: if we missed something, tell us by the end of the next day and we come back to fix it. Beyond Clean. TotalCare.
