A Clean Bed

• Sun the mattresses on both sides at least once a year .
• Vacuumed or sunned all upholstered furniture and pillows in the house (unless it was leather).
• Keep the amount of upholstered furniture in my home to a minimum, or buy leather furniture, because upholstered furniture is full of dust and dust mites and genuinely makes I and my son sick.
• Use cotton towels as throw rugs and sheets for curtains because they can be washed frequently in hot water. Or do without curtains and throw rugs altogether.
• Cleaned wall-to-wall carpetting several times per year with either a steam cleaner or a machine that uses hot water and some kind of soap/detergent.
• Used buckwheat pillows. Alternately, either washed my pillows 2 to 3 times per year (which means drying them in the drier for like 6 hours) or 'vacuum packed them' 3 to 4 times per year. To vacuum pack pillows, you put them in a large plastic bag with no holes (like a black garbage bag), stick the hose from the vacuum in it, and gather the bag closed around the hose. Then turn it on and watch the bag deflate until it is completely flat.
• When washing the bedding, washed all bedding -- blankets, sheets, stuffed animals (or vacuum-pack them if you think they cannot be washed) -- and clean the pillows and mattress all in the same day. I did not simply pull new bedding from the linen closet when I was having a crisis about my bedding. That can be as full of dust and other allergens as the stuff on the bed. I would WASH IT ALL and then put it all back on the bed.
• All feather anything (feather pillows, down comforters, etc) were washed every single week or gotten rid of. I washed my down comforters weekly until we moved to a place that wasn't so cold and the washing machine and dryer were in the basement -- you have to be close at hand because the machine almost always gets off balance when you wash these things, so the basement location made it a ridiculously time-intensive and inconvenient activity, especially given that it wasn't really cold enough for down comforters.
• Shower before bedtime. If you go to bed covered in the dust, grime, allergens, and contaminants accumulated over the course of the day, you are contaminating your bedding and breathing all that stuff all night. If you do this every night and your bedding is not washed every day, then you are sleeping in the accumulated grime for however many days in between laundering the bedding. Even if your respiratory problems don't merit taking this precaution all the time, during times when your problems are acting up, this extra precaution may make a critical difference in your ability to get things under control.