Regular maintenance of the home is important to enable you to live a peaceful and organized lifestyle. With every season, there are different maintenance tasks you need to think about. Have a look below to see five maintenance tasks you should get out of the way before fall ends.
Clean Your Gutters and Window Wells
The gutters of your house weather a lot, and they often get loaded with debris that may clog them and stop water flowing through them as it should. To make sure you’re not at risk of getting snow damage to your roof or having your driveway or even the foundation of your house destroyed, inspect the gutters. Clean them if they have dirt and debris, and straighten them if they’re crooked, tasks that will only take you a few hours but save you a lot of money in potential damage. With 98% of basements in America set to experience a type of water damage in their lifespans, make sure that yours isn’t one of them by cleaning and fixing your gutters.
Check Your Doors and Windows
Old doors and windows may be battered by extreme weather to the extent that their weather stripping has come off or cracks have developed. This is an easy enough fix to do yourself. Simply get some caulk from a local hardware store and fill any cracks you see. This will not only help you avoid cold drafts while you’re trying to relax indoors in cold weather, but it will help you save a substantial amount on heating, as you won’t need to crank the heat all the way up for long just to maintain warmth indoors.
Check Your Plumbing
Your plumbing can keep you from enjoying the winter lifestyle if it has a problem in the middle of winter. This is because it’s easy enough to fix, but water damage is one of the worst damages in the winter. Make sure that you don’t have any leaks in your system, either by checking yourself or calling in a professional to do so for you. An approximate 13 million households or more in the United States get their drinking water from private wells. If yours is one of them, it’s good to make sure that your plumbing is in good order, as you won’t be able to get help from the local water council if something goes wrong.
Service Your Furnace
The importance of a well-functioning furnace in winter cannot be overstated, which is why you should make sure it’s working well. Get a professional to perform maintenance on it if you don’t have the time or know-how, and if it has been a while since your last maintenance. At the very least, clean it out and change the filters so you will have an easy time and the promise of heat as the weather gets colder, enabling you to enjoy the winter lifestyle.
Inspect Your Roof
The fifth maintenance task is inspecting your roof before the winter. Check for any cracks or damage because the freeze and thaw cycle makes small issues a lot worse, making a small and cheap fix turn into a major project that costs you a lot of time, not to mention money. Find out how old your roof is and its lifespan as well, as this will help you know the steps to take. For instance, metal roofs can last from 40 to 70 years, depending on the specific material.
Taking the time to perform the five tasks above will see to it that you have a great season ahead. Don’t neglect to fix anything that may cause you inconvenience if it gets out of hand when fall ends!