Owning a house is much more than just sitting back after a hard day of work and having a cold beer or hot coffee in front of your fireplace.
While this is the main idea of enjoying yourself in your own home-sweet-home, to keep being able to do this, you will have to ensure all the systems within the house are running as smoothly as a greased lightning.
It doesn’t make much sense trying to relax in your armchair after a hard day of work if your roof leaks every time it starts raining or if a Biblical number of blood-thirsty mosquitos can enter your living room willy-nilly because you forgot to set up the insect net on your door earlier that year.
Improper maintenance or lack of any maintenance in your home can throw one hell of a spanner in the works of how well your place of residence runs, so to prevent mishaps and malfunctions down the road, you’d better concoct a checklist of chores and maintenance-related tasks that you need to complete all year round.
In this article, we’re going to help you out with this delicate task by providing some of the most common maintenance points you need to keep in check all year round to make your house run like clockwork.
Spring
- Roof Inspection – While spring is one of the safest seasons when it comes to having to worry about precipitation or snowfall, this also means that whatever fixes and changes to your roof, you need to pull off – you’ll need to do during this fair-weathered season.
- Also, if you’re planning on pulling off any major roof changes or fitting new roofing such as high-quality slate roofing, asphalt shingles, or something else from scratch, the time to do it would be during the warm spring months.
- Check the State of the Paint – of the exterior walls because even the most high-quality paint tends to get compromised after a while under the influence of tough weather. If you need to repaint something, spring would be the friendliest season for chunkier around-the-house projects.
Summer
- Check for Termites and other Vermin – and find their lairs before their troops find you. If left unchecked, termites, fire ants, and other similar insects can spread their territory fairly quickly and so create an even bigger problem for you down the road.
- Inspect Your Basement for Moisture – During the cold and wet seasons of autumn and winter, quite a lot of moisture and moisture-related issues (most notably mold) can affect your basement. Once the spring comes, it’s time you check what’s going on down there and if the preventive measures you set up last year held out against the tough weather of the previous two seasons.
Autumn
- Get a Good Look at Your Chimneys – With winter just around the corner, you’ll want to prepare for the incoming cold weather as well as possible. If you’re using a wood stove or any sort of heating system that requires a chimney, what you will need to do is check if the chimney is clogged and clear out any soot and potential animals that may have inhabited it in the meantime.
- Furnace Checkup – would be another example of something that you have to check in the autumn, so you don’t have to worry about it later on during the winter. A well-functioning furnace means you won’t have to worry about not being able to prepare a hot meal while it’s freezing hot outside.
Winter
- Change the Direction of the Ceiling Fans – This simple procedure often flies over many people’s heads who don’t know physics that well, but simply changing the direction in which the ceiling fan rotates will make it thrust down either cold or hot air. So, you can flip the direction of it when the winter comes for some additional heating in your rooms.
- Check the Plumbing Systems – in your bathroom, kitchen, and any place where there are pipes with water in them. If the winter is particularly cold, you may even need to insulate some of the pipes to prevent leaks or to burst.
All in all, as long as you take good care of your house systems little by little all year round, you will not only make your house a comfortable place to be in but also you can prevent having to dish out an arm and a leg on expensive repairs in case something goes wrong.
