5 Things You Need to Sanitize After Coming Home

People are paying a lot more attention to sanitizing and cleaning these days, but there are still lots of things it is easy to overlook. When you get home after an errand or at the end of the day, here are some must-sanitize items.

What are these overlooked items? Think of all of the personal possessions you touch when you’re at the grocery store, at the office, or out for a bite to eat. You might wash your hands well when you get home, but if those same items are getting handled inside your home once you wash your hands, you’re just putting the germs right back on your skin. Here are some items worth giving a little attention once you get home.

Sanitize Handles

While not an item you carry around with you, the handles you touch are prime contact points for germs. This includes the door to your house and your car door as well as any other high-contact handles or such you touch getting in and out of your home (and within your home). Here’s how to sanitize your car when you get home from work or shopping.

Hard metallic surfaces like those of doorknobs and such will naturally decontaminate over time with some pathogens only living for hours at a time but others, such as some strains of salmonella, hanging on for potentially days.

During peak cold and flu season (especially if you have young children that are natural germ incubators) you’ll likely want to be a bit more proactive about wiping down handles for frequently used things.

Sanitize Your Keys (and Car Key Fob)

You touch your car keys and key fob to get into and start your car. You touch your keys once again to open the door to your house. Be sure to wipe down your entire keyring and collection of keys each time you come home.

Rubbing alcohol on a swab or cotton pad is great for your key fob. It dries fast, disinfects, and there’s little risk to the electronic guts of the fob. If you’ve never wiped your key fob down before you might be shocked at how grimy it is.

Sanitize Your Purse and Small Items

From your purse handle to the stuff inside your purse that you touched, you will want to sanitize a few things here. When sanitizing your purse don’t forget to wipe the bottom. The bottom of the purse is the portion to comes in contact with countertops, floors, and more throughout the day.

Even if you don’t carry a purse or bag, you’ll still need to sanitize your wallet and any credit cards you used. If you had to show your ID, give that a little cleaning, too.

The same goes for any small items you handled a lot while out. AirPod case? Pocket multi-tool? Whatever the small items, if you’re using them when you’re out and about, give them a spritz of sanitizer.

Sanitize Your Sunglasses and Reading Glasses

I meticulously clean the lenses on my glasses at least a couple of times a day, but I don’t usually think about cleaning the frames or arms. Yet the frames and arms are the part of the glasses you touch frequently when taking the glasses on and off and otherwise adjusting them.

If you’re wearing sunglasses out of the house and reading glasses at the office or store, you’ll want to wipe the whole thing down when you get home.

Sanitize Your Phone, Tablet, and Electronics

You should be regularly giving your phone a good cleaning anyway, because it picks up germs everywhere you go (even into the bathroom to play that game you’re addicted to). Here’s an article with some easy tips on how often you should be cleaning your phone. If you want an easy-peasy way to sanitize your phone a good UV sanitizer like the Phone Soap is a dead-simple way to clean and charge it.

If you take your tablet or laptop to the office or a coffee shop, it will need sanitizing as well. I take my old iPod in the car for something to listen to other than the radio (my old but dependable car doesn’t even have a CD player!), so I sanitize it when I carry it back in the house after a trip.

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This may seem like a lot of obsessive cleaning, but it’s a simple safety measure that can help protect you and your family from the spread of unwanted germs and viruses.