The smoke has cleared, the grill has cooled off, scorch marks and tattered papers litter the driveway and the road out front - it must mean another July 4th has come and gone.
Hopefully your Fourth of July celebrations were safe and fun for the entire family, but now that the fun has died down you’re probably left with...a bit of a mess.
No doubt you’ve handled messes before, but messes from a good 4th of July party tend to require a little extra care and consideration when you’re sweeping away the rubble. If you’re waking up bleary-eyed and smelling of sulfur from another fun Independence Day with loved ones, here’s a few things to consider when it’s time to tidy up:
Take care of those leftovers. Not that we’re speaking from experience, but people tend to make a little more than they need to when the Fourth rolls around. Now might be a good excuse to purge your fridge of all the mysterious Tupperware and take-out boxes you’ve forgotten about and will never finish, and move your new leftovers in (hopefully to be eaten later). Anything that doesn’t have to be refrigerated can be kept in kitchen cabinet organizers to keep them safe and out of the way from everything else you need to grab out of the cabinet.
Safe storage for the fireworks you didn’t use. We’ve all done it - spend a ton of money at the fireworks booth in the weeks leading up to the big day, and then letting off maybe half of them and then heading to bed. There’s no shame in it (and now you have them all for next year) but these things are going to have to be kept safely out of little hands and away from any possible sources of accidents and injury. Set up some shelves in a safe place like the garage, basement, or in a storage shed (all of them far away from heat sources, of course) and try to keep an eye on them over the next year or so until the next 4th rolls around.
...and for the ones you did use. If you weren’t in any shape to get them all cleaned up yesterday, odds are there’s still some burned-out remains of fireworks around the yard and the house. Care should be taken when disposing of these - make absolutely sure they’re out and unusable, and try to dump out any remaining mortar or clay at the bottom. A lot of fireworks suggest submerging it in water before disposing of the remains, and this might not be a bad idea if you’ve got concerns. (This is also a good time to grab the hose and try to wash the scorch marks off the driveway from the various fountains and snakes your kids brought with them.)
Clean out that grill. If you’re a charcoal kind of chef, you might want to put this step off for last so you have time to dispose of it properly. Generally speaking, when disposing of coal you want to make sure it’s been completely burned through, and you wants to wait 48 hours before disposing of the ashes for both safety reasons and to keep it an easier consistency to clean up and get rid of. Dump the pile in some tin foil, wrap it up tight, and make sure it goes into a non-combustible container for the garbagemen to pick up.
Separate the recyclables. We don’t need to get into the details, but you’ve probably got a lot of aluminum and glass drink containers around the house that need to be taken care of. However you dispose of your recycling, be it at a supermarket to get that sweet returnable money or just to give it to the bright orange trucks that come around once a week, get a different trash bag or some plastic storage bins to keep everything divided between what can get recycled and what can’t. If you’ve got some kid-safe drink containers in the mix, this could be a good opportunity to get the kids to help out with something easy that can save you a ton of time.
Hopefully with these tips, your house will be back to normal in no time - and you’ll be all set for next year!