This fall, when you are sipping on pumpkin spice lattes and hanging wreaths on your front doors, take up a new responsibility: home maintenance!
Being a homeowner comes with a lot of responsibilities and maintenance is one of them. Here’s how you can make your home fall-ready.
1. Clean, or possibly replace your gutters
Make sure you clean out your rain gutters twice or thrice every year. Give your gutters a little attention every season. Ignoring your gutters can be really harmful to your house in the long run. Clogged gutters can damage your exterior and rot the wooden fascia boards. Clogged gutters can also cause interior leaks in your house.
Clogged gutters can be a great discomfort if you share your wall with an irresponsible neighbor. If your neighbor’s gutters or eaves are clogged, they might damage your house. Make sure you inform them timely. If they refuse to fix it and your house gets damaged, you can sue your neighbors for the damages. Don’t worry about funding the lawsuit, you can easily get settlement money from the best settlement funding firms out there.
Bottom line: Give your gutters their due attention.
2. Check Your Window Seals
Check the sealing of your windows. The sealing of your windows can wear off over time and this is the major culprit for heat loss.
Weatherstripping your house is quite cost-effective in the long run. Not only does it cost less in the first place but also it helps you conserve energy. We all know how heavy those heating costs are on the pocket!
3. Vacuum Your Filters
Clogged filters are actually costing you more money. When your filters are clogged, it becomes impossible to maintain a steady heating temperature on a budget. Cleaning your filters is pretty easy, just vacuum them and fit them right back in!
You should clean your filters regularly, not just before fall. Make it a monthly thing or whenever you do a deep cleaning of the house. You can vacuum and reuse disposable filters twice while foam filters have no such limit.
4. Fall is a Nice Time to Pop-in Some New Batteries
Let’s face it: We all tend to procrastinate when it comes to the maintenance of our homes. Take those smoke detectors or CO devices for example. How often do you check their batteries? You probably can’t remember the last time you did that.
Fall is a nice time to start doing little things around the house. So, go check the batteries in all the smoke detectors and alarms. Make sure you get some extra batteries as well, for emergency situations.
5. Prep Your Lawn
An aesthetically pleasing lawn is a dream of many, worked for by few.
You can’t have a great-looking lawn in the spring/summer if you don’t prep for it in fall/winter! Fall is the right time to start nourishing the roots of your grass and plants. Moreover, winter can greatly damage the roots if you don’t apply fertilizer all over your lawn. It’s important to keep the roots alive and thriving all through winter so that they can sprout out healthy plants in the spring.
6. Clean all the outdoor faucets
It is important to drain all the outdoor faucets and disconnect them right before winter. They will freeze, pipes will burst, and the damage will cost you quite a lot. Make sure you clean out all the outdoor faucets and disconnect the water connection right as fall starts.
Final Thoughts
Make your fall even cozier by making sure that your home is in great shape. Turn all these maintenance tasks into fun family activities. This will not only make the daunting tasks fun but also inculcate a sense of responsibility in your kids.
