Getting your home ready for Winter

While it is always fun to focus on finding or designing your perfect home, or even the ways you celebrate and exist in your home. It is also important that we take care to spend some time and energy caring for your home so it will continue to care for you! Autumn is one of the most crucial times to be on top of home care and prep as you get ready for winter weather to roll in. Here are a few tips and tricks to get your house ready for the colder months.

1. Prepare your exterior plumbing

If you have exterior hose spigots, begin by turning them off in the house (generally, if the lever is parallel to the pipe it is open.[image 1] If it is perpendicular to the pipe [image 2] it is closed) Then go outside and turn on the water to drain any left in the pipe. Finish by attaching a foam faucet cover (available at most hardware stores or online for under $5). This will keep the pipes from freezing and causing leaks or pipe bursts.

2. Clean out those gutters!

Once the snow and ice begin you won’t want to be up on that ladder. With the fluctuating temperatures we usually see, as the winter weather sits on your roof then begins to melt on warmer days just to freeze again at night, you will be glad you gave it a clear path to move away from your house. Gutters full of leaves and twigs will create heavy ice dams that can damage your gutter systems, downspouts, and possibly your roof.

3. Service your heating system

Whether you have a furnace, a boiler, a mini split, or no clue how the heat makes it into your home… now is the time for its annual checkup. You don’t want to wait until the temperatures drop below freezing to figure out that during the last 5 months of non-use, something with your system has gone wrong. That’s a recipe to find yourself deep on a waiting list for a service provider to be able to get to you. A system check up usually runs between $100 and $300 depending on your heating system but can save you quite a bit of frustration and cost later on. (for those of you with oil tanks, be sure you have enough in the tank as well!

4. Break out the winter tools.

I know, I know… it seems premature, but we have seen snowy Halloweens before. So make sure you have your shovels handy, gas for that snowblower, and some ice melt ready to go. Hopefully you won’t need it for a while but better to be prepared. If you have a four legged family member who goes out in the snow, don’t get caught without paw friendly ice melt, some ice melts can do serious damage to our fuzzy little family members.

5. Reverse your ceiling fans

Most ceiling fans have a reverse switch, be sure your fan is running clockwise once you turn on your heat. The fan will create an updraft and push the heated air from the ceiling down into the room (remember, hot air rises).

6. Don’t rake your leaves

That’s right, I said DON’T rake your leaves…. ok, if you want to rake some to make a pile for jumping in, go for it, but that’s it! Instead, mow your leaves. Your best option is to try and do this while they are dry and you may need to do it a few times to get them small enough. Take that grass catcher off the mower when you are mowing your leaves and get them into small pieces around the size of a dime or smaller. Over the winter, these small pieces of fall foliage that you have spread throughout your lawn by mowing, will decompose and fertilize your lawn providing lots of fantastic nutrients to help it come back even better next spring.

7. Get your chimney swept

Just like getting your heating system maintained, you want to get your chimney swept before you need to light that first fire and before there is a layer of ice on the roof making it too perilous to climb up there. Keeping a clean path for smoke to escape prevents chimney fires and makes sure that you don’t have carbon monoxide backing up into your house this winter.

8. Manage branches over your roof

Branches that are hanging over your roof may not seem like a big deal in the Autumn, but once they are weighed down with snow and winter storms are whipping them around, those branches can cause all kind of havoc. Now is the time to trim those branches back and protect your roof from winter damage.