You could wait until cooler weather to run through your end of summer or fall home maintenance checklist, but the last thing you want is cold weather to set in before you have a chance to do needed home maintenance or repairs.
For that reason, we are calling this a back to school home maintenance checklist, hoping that with the kids back in class (or going back to school soon), you may have some extra time to get your home ready for the colder winter coming in the fall and winter. Here’s a seasonal 10 point fall home maintenance checklist you can do before kids to back to school, at the end of each summer.
A 10-Point DIY Fall Home Maintenance Checklist for Home Owners
- Have you been putting off re-staining or sealing your deck? Take advantage of the remaining warm, dry weather to clean and seal or stain your deck before wet weather arrives to do damage. And the same goes for your home’s window and door trim, gutters and other areas which may have had surfaces exposed, paint or stain eroded, etc.
- Do you have any loose exterior trim pieces, window or door seals, gutters, shingles, siding or roofing? You don’t want to be climbing up the side of or onto your house to make repairs in the wind or rain. Check the underside of your home’s gutters and eaves for any sign of water leaks.
- When you are doing seasonal fall home maintenance at the end of summer or during the back to school season, it’s the perfect time to have your ducts and chimney flue cleaned and vacuumed, before you shut yourself and your family behind closed doors and windows with all of the dust which may have accumulated during the past year.
- And while we’re on the subject of the dust that accumulates during summer months when doors and windows are open more often, dust off the blades of those ceiling fans.
- Clean your furnace filters before it goes back to work for the fall and winter. Think about having a professional come out to give your furnace a ‘check up’ before you really need it.
- Do you have a gas fireplace? Check to make sure that you can re-light the pilot if you turned it off at the beginning of summer. Think about how you want to program or schedule your home’s heating system to be most energy efficient this winter for weekdays, weekend days and nights.
- Locate and test all of your smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors and change their batteries (unless you do this each spring).
- Double check your family’s emergency exit plan in case of fire and supply of first aid and emergency supplies, including fresh water. If you have children, you might even hold a fire drill, earthquake drill or another emergency prep drill so that if something does occur, everyone in your family knows how to get to safety.
- Now is a great time to do any interior painting you have planned for the coming year as well, while it’s still warm enough to leave your windows open to ensure good ventilation of any fumes and help paint dry faster.
- Create a plan for how you want to prepare your yard, garden and flower beds before winter sets in. Make a list of plants which need to be cut back during cold weather months or which need to be removed – you will definitely want to do this before any freezing temperatures set in that make yard work difficult!
Our end-of-summer fall home maintenance checklist may not be complete; feel free to leave a comment below with additional tips to help other homeowners prepare get their home ready for fall and winter.
If you aren’t a home owner yet (but would like to be) we invite you to come out and see some of Soundbuilt Homes’ new homes for sale in Pierce county, King county and Thurston county built by Soundbuilt Homes. While we can’t build a new home that will never require seasonal home maintenance, we can assure you that we build lasting quality into each and every Soundbuilt Home we build!