Winter is Coming! 6 Bits and Bobs to Check Out Before the First Snow
The fall is slowly coming to its end, meaning you’ll soon have to start thinking about the stuff you need to do before colder months knock on your door. It is not just about being dutiful – preparing the exterior and the interior of your home for the winter also means it could save you a lot of money when the spring comes. Many things can go wrong during the winter months if you haven’t prepared your home properly for low temperatures. Here’s what has to be checked out.
1. Sealing off the drafty windows
Before the heating starts, it’s necessary to check all the windows for the draft. If you don’t deal with faulty windows in time, it will make you lose a lot of heat in the room. Check the weather stripping first and replace it if needed. Next, if you notice the draft in any of the windows, you could easily caulk it. However, if the windows are old and your goal is to keep some extra heat in the house, maybe the best option would be to install plastic insulation on them.
2. Disconnecting garden hoses
If you forget to disconnect a garden hose from a spigot, the water will remain trapped in the spigot. When the water freezes due to low temperature, it could damage both the spigot and the hose. A worse possibility is that the pipe behind the spigot explodes under pressure, wasting gallons of water – don’t think that a frost-proof spigot is a guarantee this will not happen.
3. Cleaning the gutters and downspouts
If you leave the gutters and downspouts unattended, you are risking a leaking in your roof or ice dams when the temperature goes below zero. People tend to forget about the gutters simply because the weather doesn’t get too cold. But the truth is, the moisture made by the unattended debris in the gutters leads to damage to your roof over the course of months. So, after the leaves have fallen off, make sure you clean them properly.
4. Interior painting
Warm months are reserved for so many works inside and outside the house that you need to use the fall months for doing whatever you can. Painting the interior is what many homeowners in Australia choose to do before the winter comes because summer months are very humid. As workers in companies such as A Professional Painting and others related to interior services often stress out that the paint dries much faster in cold months, no wonder these works mostly happen then.
5. Protecting your seasonal tools
Once the fall is at its end and you don’t have any more use from seasonal tools such as shovels, rakes and others, clean them thoroughly and spray them with a coating of oil. This will protect them from the rust. A lawn mower needs special cleaning because it’s full of debris, mud and grass.
6. Cleaning the chimney
It’s highly important to thoroughly clean the chimney before the winter because a dirty chimney seriously affects the air quality in your home. As the chimney is where all the harmful gases, smoke and heat go through to get out of the house, it’s logical that the chimney needs to be cleaned to prevent air from pollution, but also to prevent the fire hazard. It’s necessary to have an annual inspection of the chimney, but when it comes to cleaning, the golden rule is: the more you use the chimney, the more often you should clean it.
Final comment
Preparing your household for the winter will save you a lot of headaches during the winter and after it. The chores at the end of the fall will only take you a few days but they will guarantee you that you will have a peaceful winter.