Sometime in April, a large number of Mesa houses go quiet. The winter residents drive back to Michigan, Minnesota, Alberta, and the Dakotas, the blinds go down, the thermostat gets set somewhere in the eighties, and the house sits closed through a desert summer.
Whatever is on the beds sits through it too.
Most people give this about thirty seconds of thought on the way out the door, and then spend the first two days back in November dealing with the consequences. It is a solvable problem and the solution takes one afternoon in April.
What five months of heat does to fabric
A closed-up house here does not stay at the thermostat setting. Set to eighty-five, the interior of a shut house routinely runs warmer in the afternoons, and a bedroom on the west side with the sun on it runs warmer still.
Heat accelerates chemistry. The sweat and skin oil sitting in bedding you left unwashed does not simply wait for you. It oxidizes, and heat speeds that up considerably. The yellow-brown discoloration that shows up on stored linens is that reaction finishing. Five Arizona summer months does more of it than a year in a temperate closet would.
By the time you see it, it is not soil sitting on the fabric. It is a change in the fiber itself, and washing does not reverse it.
The same residue is what makes bedding interesting to pests. Clean cotton is not food. Cotton carrying body oil is, and an empty house is a quiet place for something to work undisturbed for months.
The April checklist
Wash everything before you leave. Sheets, pillowcases, mattress pads, comforters, the throw on the chair. The guest room set that nobody slept in counts too, because it has been sitting made up collecting dust since February.
Dry it completely. This gets less attention here than it deserves because the air is dry and everything feels done. Thick items hold moisture in the seams and the middle of the fill well past the point the surface feels dry. Give comforters and pillows substantially longer than seems necessary.
Strip the beds rather than leaving them made. A made bed is a dust collector for five months, and there is nobody there to shake it out. Bare mattress with a protector on it, everything else put away.
Store it out of plastic. This is the one people get wrong most often. A sealed plastic bin in a hot house is a small oven with no air exchange, and anything that was not perfectly dry becomes a problem inside it. Cotton storage bags, a spare pillowcase, or a bin with a lid that is not gasketed. You want dust kept out and air able to move.
Skip the vacuum bags for down. Down works by trapping air in clusters, and compressing those clusters flat for five months permanently damages some of them. The comforter comes back thinner than it went away.
Keep it off the garage. A garage in a Mesa summer is dramatically hotter than the house, and it is the worst place in the property for textiles. Interior closet, off the floor.
Coming back in the fall
Plan on washing everything again before it goes on a bed, even though you washed it in April. Five months in a closed house means dust, and it means the stale smell that closed spaces produce regardless of how clean the fabric was going in.
Warm water, no fabric softener, and dry it thoroughly. For a stale rather than genuinely musty smell, half a cup of white vinegar in the rinse cycle handles it, because vinegar is mildly acidic and breaks down the residue that holds odor.
If a down comforter came out flat, a dryer cycle on low with a few dryer balls brings back a surprising amount of the loft.
Do this on day one, not day four. The bed is the thing you actually need working on the first night, and it is the task most likely to get postponed while you deal with the pool and the car and the mail.
The volume problem
A seasonal house has more beds than a household washer wants to see in one week. Two or three bedrooms, guest linens, plus every comforter, all needing to run before you leave or right after you arrive.
At home that is four or five evenings of single loads, and comforters generally will not rinse properly in a home machine anyway. The machines at our self-service laundry on West Main let you run the whole house in parallel rather than in series, comforters included, in one afternoon.
Twice a year, once on the way out and once on the way back, covers it. If you are arriving or departing and the afternoon does not exist, our wash-dry-fold service takes the whole pile.
The short version
Wash everything before you close the house, dry it far past the point it feels dry, strip the beds, and store it breathable and out of plastic in an interior closet rather than the garage. No vacuum bags for down. Wash it all again on the way back in, and do it the first day rather than the fourth.
WaveMAX Mesa on West Main is at 1932 W Main St, easy to reach from west Mesa and the neighborhoods along Main. If you are heading out for the season and want to know what a particular comforter can take, call us at (480) 687-5193 before you wash it.