Meet IT: The Uninvited Houseguest That's Been Living in Your Home for Years

We’ve all experienced the moment. You know the one—you move the couch for the first time in months, or reach behind the dryer to grab a wayward sock, or glance up at the air vent while you're watching TV, and there IT is. That thing. The buildup. The quiet evidence that something has been living in your home, completely unbothered, while you went about your life.

You've always known IT was there. You just never had a name for IT.

Until now.
 

Meet IT

IT is COIT's name for everything that hides in the corners, fibers, vents, and surfaces of your home. IT is not one specific thing. IT is all of it. The dust,  the allergens, the stains, the buildup in the places you rarely look and can't always reach, the thing lurking in your dryer vents, hiding in the carpet, and circulating through your air every time the HVAC kicks on.

IT has been a part of every home in human history, which IT considers completely unremarkable. The average home accumulates around 40 pounds of dust per year, which is particularly problematic given the EPA has found that indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air. IT is aware of these statistics and remains unbothered.

What makes IT worth paying attention to is not that IT exists (IT always has, in every home, everywhere). What matters is how much of IT you are living with, and how long IT has been left to its own devices.

 

IT Has Been Here Longer Than You Think

Having evolved to withstand society's best efforts to evict IT, sometimes, it’s impossible to see IT with the naked eye. By nature, IT is patient. IT does not announce itself, and IT does not make demands or draw attention to its presence. IT simply accumulates, quietly and consistently, in the places that routine cleaning does not and can not reach (and then stays there).

This is not a criticism of how you clean your home; it’s just that a standard surface-level clean can only go so far. What settles into carpet fibers, duct systems, behind appliances, and deep into porous materials, like natural stone, requires a different kind of attention entirely. IT knows this, and IT is counting on it.

The effects of IT living undisturbed in a home are real. Prolonged exposure to high concentrations of indoor allergens and dust has been linked to increased coughing, sneezing, and aggravated respiratory symptoms—particularly in children and anyone with existing sensitivities. The EPA lists indoor air pollutants among the top environmental health concerns facing American households, and most of those pollutants come from exactly the kinds of places IT likes to hide.

If any of these sound familiar, IT has probably been around you longer than you'd like to admit:

• Allergy or asthma symptoms that are worse indoors than outside
• A stale or musty smell that does not respond to air freshener
• Dust that comes back almost immediately after you've cleaned
• A general awareness that something needs to be dealt with, paired with a reluctance to look too closely for fear of actually having to deal with IT

IT Is Everywhere. We Mean That.

There is no home that does not have IT. There is no zip code IT avoids, no neighborhood IT has decided is 

too clean to bother with. IT has been found in brand new construction and in houses that have stood for a hundred years. IT does not discriminate. IT simply prefers the places that go undisturbed, and in the average home, there are more of those than most people realize.

Behind appliances, inside ductwork, deep in upholstery, nestled in grout lines, and on the surfaces that get wiped down but never truly cleaned. IT finds all of these places perfectly acceptable and sees no reason to leave.

This is not meant to alarm you. Every home has IT to some degree. The question is never whether IT is there. The question is how much and how long it has been hiding. 

IT Happens 

IT happens in every home. A spill that gets blotted but not extracted. Lint that escapes the trap and builds up somewhere you cannot see. Air that circulates through a system that has never been deep-cleaned. A surface that gets wiped every day but is never sealed. These are not signs of a dirty home—they are signs of a lived-in one. 

IT is simply what happens when life happens, which is exactly where COIT comes in.

COIT has been dealing with IT since 1950. Not as a concept, but as the actual thing. Our technicians have seen IT in every corner of every home, and they know where IT hides, how IT operates, and what it actually takes to get rid of IT.

The tagline is not a catchphrase. It is an accurate description of what we do.

IT happens. And when IT does, call COIT.

Get to Know IT

Over the course of 75 years, we have spent a lot of time studying IT. We know IT's habits, IT's preferred hiding spots, and the particular kind of confidence IT develops when left alone for too long. We also know that most homeowners are more forgiving toward IT than they should be…not because they want to be, but because IT is easy to ignore right up until IT isn't.

We're in the process of introducing IT properly. To give IT the name, a face, and expose the reputation IT has quietly earned over the past billion years or so.

You can learn more about IT, what we know about IT, and what we do about IT at the link below. We promise IT is worth knowing. After all, the first step to dealing with IT is knowing what you are dealing with.

IT happens. COIT handles it. We always have and we always will. 

Ready to do something about IT? Visit the link and meet IT officially, then let us know where IT has been hiding in your home.