Fall Home Maintenance Checklist To Boost Curb Appeal

There are many things you should do to prepare your home for the fall and winter months ahead. With this fall home maintenance checklist, your home will be prepared and looking refreshed.

Now fall is here in earnest, you’ll start thinking about what you’ll need to do with your home. You want to take good care of the house, and as the weather turns colder you’ll need to maintain the exterior.

Here is your fall home maintenance checklist, so you can keep your home looking good throughout the colder months.

1. Check Your Roof

Your roof is one of the most important parts of your home. It is the home’s first line of protection against water, which causes all kinds of problems. Water can lead to rot, mold, and leaks, so you want to ensure you’re taking good care of it.

Get up on the roof and check to see how it’s looking.

• Firstly, look to see if there are any shingles broken or missing there. If there are, this is a prime place for water to start getting in. You can replace those shingles quite easily, so ensure that you get that done.
• The next thing to do is to trim away any trees that are too close to your roof. During bad weather, they will bang against the roof, damaging it. Worse, branches could even fall and break the roof itself.
• Finally, as fall has arrived the leaves are falling. That means they’re falling into your gutters too. If this goes on for too long your gutters will become blocked, leading to overflows and more water damage. All you need to do is pull out the leaves to unblock the gutters, and install a gutter guard to stop this from happening again.

2. Repaint Your Exterior Walls

Over the warmer months, your exterior walls have been through a lot. You’ll see that over the summer, the paint has begun to peel and fade under the harsh sun. If you’re serious about improving your curb appeal, then you’re going to need to correct this to make your home look fresh and new.

This is a large job, so you may want to hire a professional to paint the exterior of your home. If you want to do it yourself though, it is possible. Ensure you leave enough time so you can let each layer of paint dry and cure properly. Use a guide to help you find the best paint for your home, and the best technique so you’ll get a home that looks amazing, ready for the holidays.

3. Waterproof Your Home

On the subject of painting, you’ll also need to look into waterproofing your home’s exteriors. Just like your roof, the walls are susceptible to water getting through and causing problems. Mold can begin to grow, leading to parts of the wall needing to be treated or even be removed to stop the spread.

If you want to stop this from happening, then you can get your home exterior waterproofed. Again, you can do it yourself, or hire a team to do this for you. If you’re worried about the waterproofing on your home, it is recommended that you get experts to do it for you.

4. Check For Drafts

As the temperatures start to fall, the next step in your fall home maintenance checklist is to ensure there are no drafts in the house. If there are drafts, you’re going to find it much harder to heat your home, driving up heating costs. You want to avoid this, so check around your home for drafts.

The easiest way to fix this is to use weather stripping to seal them up. If you’re not sure if you need weather stripping, use the paper test.

• Close the door on a piece of paper
• If it slides down, you’ll need to seal the gap.

When there are drafts coming through windows, you may want to look into replacing the windows. Newer windows are much better at stopping drafts, and keeping that heat in.

5. Bring the Outdoor Furniture In

You probably have all kinds of furniture outdoors. There’s the patio furniture, barbecue, seating, and of course the kids’ toys. If they’re left outdoors during the colder part of the year, then they are going to see damage.

Frost, rain, hail, and more will all cause damage to them. If there are high winds, they could even be blown around the yard. This will damage them, and may even damage the sides of your home.

As soon as the weather gets colder, bring in all your furniture and store it carefully. If you take good care of it, it will last for years, and you won’t have to worry about any damage to your property.

6. Fix the Cracks in Your Driveway

If you have cracks in your driveway, you’ve probably been putting off fixing it. It doesn’t matter, does it? During the fall it’s more important than you’d think. As the temperatures drop, water can start to pool up in the cracks. If the water freezes, it will push the crack apart and make it bigger.

Before this happens, repair those cracks and stop this from happening. Plus, your driveway will start looking a lot better, so it’s worth getting started now.

7. Look After Your Lawn

Yes, the lawn isn’t growing right now, but it’s still alive there. You’ve got to take good care of it now if you want it to look good next year.

Now is the best time to fertilize the lawn, to feed it while it’s dormant. If you do this, when spring rolls around you’ll find that the lawn is much healthier.

8. Test Your Winter Equipment

Finally, you’ll want to test out your winter equipment, such as your snowblowers and other tools. You’ll need these to be working once the winter really starts, so don’t wait until it’s too late to fix it. Test them all out now, and see what needs to be repaired.

Conclusion

There are lots of different things that are included in your fall home improvement checklist. Improve the paintwork, fix your roof, check your equipment, and fix anything that needs to be fixed now.

Once you’ve done it, you’ll have a home that looks beautiful and will be ready for that cold weather.