Winter Home Maintenance Tips Everyone Should Follow

The winter season is always an exciting time for holiday festivities, cozy socks, and delicious food. With that, comes the need for yearly maintenance throughout your home and taking the proper steps to ensure you can safely enjoy the new season and holidays.

1. Clean The Gutters

Ignoring this basic home maintenance tip could lead to a snowfall effect of issues that would potentially cost you thousands of dollars in repairs. It is a general rule that gutters should be cleaned twice a year and it is always especially smart to check your gutters after heavy rainfall to make sure they aren’t clogged. You can schedule a gutter cleaning service in minutes, and they can cost as low as $100 depending on your home size.

2. Tune Up Your HVAC

In order to avoid breakdowns in the winter weather, invest in a HVAC tune-up. This will help reduce energy costs and extend the working life of your equipment. Most importantly, you can safeguard the health and safety of your family, particularly by checking for potentially dangerous carbon monoxide leaks in the heat exchanger of the furnace.

3. Organize Your Garage

There’s something about a well-organized garage that will help you complete other home maintenance chores on your list. If your garage is so packed your car cannot even fit inside, you may need to hire professionals. If not, there are simple things you can do to organize.

• Clean out your entire garage before organizing

• Set up sections within your garage

• Look into mounting wall shelves for more space or add wire shelves

• Utilize storage containers

• Create space for everyday items

4. Septic Tank Treatment

It is important to hire professionals to thoroughly clean and maintain your home’s septic tank. Like other home maintenance, this will allow you to avoid future problems because ignoring septic system maintenance could lead to irreversible damage that jeopardizes the quality of your groundwater and costs you thousands of dollars in repairs. Professional inspectors will look for pipe integrity, proper drainage, and ventilation. How often it has to be drained depends on its size; some need to be replaced every 20–40 years, while others can need more. As a rule of thumb, it is said that you will need to have the sludge pumped out of it and disposed of every few years. It’s essential to find the best septic services in your area. In Georgia, Scorpion Septic has all of your needs for maintaining and pumping your septic problems away. They are septic pumping in Marietta and can answer any and all questions you may have such as affordability, time, and more.

5. Improve Outdoor Lighting

In the wintertime, it gets darker a lot faster. Be sure to have safely lit walkways outside your home. Solar lights are very easy to install since they require no wiring, but the downside is that they need to get enough sunlight which doesn’t always happen in the winter especially depending on where you live. I always think the best thing to get is security lighting. They can potentially scare off would-be burglars or stray animals. My motion-sensing floodlights that mount to the service of the outside of my townhome contain three bulb housing units that go on only when built-in sensors detect movement in the area. Ring’s floodlights are weather resistant and extremely affordable and easy to install.

6. Deep Clean Your Bathrooms

Our bathrooms probably hold the most germs out of every area in our homes. The main rule to keeping a bathroom as clean as possible is to keep it dry. After use, it is important to dry all surfaces. The following steps will help you maintain a clean bathroom all winter.

• Descale the shower head: let it soak overnight in white vinegar then reattach it the next morning.

• Clean the shower doors: Create a paste of white vinegar and baking soda making sure it is nice and thick then use a microfiber cloth to clean the doors.

• Refresh Dingy Grout: Seal grout every six months to help prevent moisture and grime from infiltrating.

• Clean Bathroom Countertops, Walls, and Ceilings: A pro-tip to minimize watermarks on ceramic tile is to apply a coat of car wax once a year.