How to Clean and Store Window Screens Before Minnesota Winter

There is a short stretch every fall in the Twin Cities, usually the few weeks between the last warm weekend and the first hard freeze, when cleaning window screens is genuinely easy. Wait too long and you are wrestling cold metal frames with gloves on, or you give up and leave dingy screens hanging until May. Spending twenty minutes a room right now buys you more daylight through the glass all winter and screens that slide back in without a fight in the spring.

Why screens come out before winter here

A window screen is a fine net stretched over a frame, and that net catches light as well as it catches bugs. Minnesota days are already getting short, and they keep shrinking until late December. On a south- or west-facing window that only gets a few hours of sun, taking the screen off is the difference between a room that feels bright at 3 p.m. and one that does not.

The second reason is wear. Snow packs into screen mesh, ice forms in it, and the freeze-and-thaw swings we get all winter work on the corners of the frame. Screens left up through a hard Minnesota winter often come down sagging, stretched, or pulled loose at the edges, and that is a repair you pay for in the spring instead of a chore you skipped in the fall.

What is actually on your screens by September

Nothing dramatic, just a whole season stacked up. Maple seeds and tree pollen in April and May. Cottonwood fluff in June, which is the one that mats into the mesh. Street dust and grass clippings all summer. If you run sprinklers, the spray dries into a chalky mineral film that grays the whole screen evenly. Add a season of spiderwebs and bugs and you get a haze you stopped noticing because it arrived so slowly.

How to clean window screens at home

The job is simple, and the mistakes people make are mostly about force and about drying. Work through it like this:

• Take screens out one room at a time so you never lose track of which one goes where.
• Label each screen on the frame with a piece of masking tape: "kitchen left," "front bedroom right." Screens are rarely identical, and next spring you will not remember.
• Lay the screen flat or lean it against a fence, then rinse both sides with a garden hose on a gentle setting.
• Wash with a soft brush and a squirt of dish soap in a bucket of warm water, going in one direction rather than scrubbing back and forth.
• Rinse again from the top down until the water runs clear.
• Let each screen dry completely, standing on edge, before it goes anywhere near storage. A damp screen stored in a basement is how you end up with a musty, spotted one.
• Skip the pressure washer. It will stretch the mesh or blow it right out of the frame, and the repair costs more than the time you saved.

Look the frames over while they are out

This is the part most people skip, and it is the part that saves money. With the screen in your hands and good light on it, check for small tears you can patch now, corners that have pulled apart, a loose rubber cord holding the mesh in its channel, and missing pull tabs. Set anything that needs replacing in its own pile. Ordering or rebuilding a screen in October is a calm errand. Doing it in May, when everyone else wants their screens back, is not.

Store them so they come out flat

Stand screens on edge against a garage or basement wall rather than stacking them flat with weight on top, which is what bends frames and pushes mesh out of shape. Keep them somewhere they will not get hit by a car door or a snowblower, group them by room, and leave the masking tape labels on until they are back in the windows next spring.

Clean the glass while the screens are off

Screens off is the one moment all year when the whole window is exposed, so it is the natural time to do the glass. That goes for the frames, sills, and tracks too, where the grit that grinds up your weatherstripping collects. If you have wondered how often this really needs doing in our climate, we walked through it in how often to clean windows in Minnesota.

Exterior glass is the piece with a deadline attached. Once temperatures stay below freezing, outside window cleaning gets difficult, so late fall is the practical cutoff. We clean exterior glass with purified water through a water-fed pole that reaches up to 40 feet from the ground, which means second- and third-story windows without anyone climbing around your house, and the results are backed by our Gleam Guarantee. The details are on our window cleaning page.

It is also the sensible time to pair the job with gutter cleaning in St. Paul, since both need to happen after the leaves come down and before things freeze up.

When it is worth handing off

Doing your own screens on a single-story house with a hose out back is a reasonable Saturday. It stops being reasonable when the house is two or three stories, when there are twenty-plus windows, when there is no outdoor spigot, or when the screens are built into storm windows that do not come out easily.

That is the work we do every fall across the metro, from St. Paul to Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs, and window cleaning here includes the frames, sills, screens, and tracks rather than just the glass.

Get on the fall schedule

If you want your screens cleaned and checked and your glass done before the cold sets in, now is the time to get on the calendar. You can request a free quote or book a free consultation, or call us at (763) 237-4106 and we will figure out what your house needs.