For most of the country, it’s the time of year where snow days become a sad inevitability - and for the rest of the country, wow, must be nice. Winter bitterness aside, snow days tend to be a mixed bag of blessings. It’s nice to get out of work early (or not have to go in at all), and if you’ve got kids they’re bound to be in good moods, but they can be...kinda boring sometimes, can’t they? But they don’t have to be! After you’ve finished off your hot chocolate and caught up on Netflix, we’ve got a few easy chores you can take a stab at while you wait for the roads to clear! Start those smaller DIY projects: If you’re going to be stuck inside, you might as well start making those little changes you’ve been pondering. Get some wallpaper or shelf liners to decorate those shelves and cabinets! Hang those shelf brackets you’ve had in the basement all year! Assemble that coffee table you bought but got too intimidated to finish! You don’t have to totally repaint the entire living room, but for all those projects you ‘needed a whole afternoon for’, now’s your chance! Clean those hard-to-get-to areas: During your usual cleaning binges you probably get the big obvious stuff: the living room floor, the dirty laundry, so on and so forth. With the extra time afforded by snow days, you get a good chance to do some of the oft-neglected cleaning tasks such as:

• Replacing light bulbs
• Cleaning high windows
• Dusting high areas - above cabinets, the top of the fridge, etc
• Washing light fixtures

Or any other area you notice has gotten a little...funky due to neglect. (Not that we’re judging - who really looks above the cabinets, anyway?) Clean out your washing machine: It sounds like kind of an oxymoron - after all, the washing machine is there for washing, is it not? - but even the washing machine can get a little cruddy. Run two cycles, one with bleach, one with vinegar, and it’ll remove residue left behind by soaps and will help wash your clothes more effectively than ever before. Tackle that junk drawer: We all have one (or three), and even despite the name, there can be a lot of stuff that piles up in a junk drawer that can be pretty safely disposed of. Grab a trash can and a comfy chair, go through your junk drawer, and toss out anything you don’t really need, like expired batteries, glasses with outdated prescriptions, that map to the vacation resort you may never go to again, playing card decks with a few of the diamonds missing...you’ll know it when you see it. Meal prep: If you’ve got the time, why not make a couple lunches or dinners for the next few days to save yourself time when the weather calms down and you have to go back out into the world? Prepare some lunches and snacks for the kids, make a few freezer dinners (or something that can easily be thrown back into the Crock-Pot), and pace them out through the rest of the week to make mealtime that much easier. And once you’re done with all this, get back on Netflix - you’ve earned it! Got any other fun snow day tips? Drop a comment below!