In order to keep your home safe and comfortable all throughout fall and winter, there is some prep work that needs to be done. To help you cover it all, here is a home maintenance checklist for fall in the Pacific Northwest! 

Inspect your roof 

While the home maintenance checklist for fall in the Pacific Northwest is not as complex as in colder areas of the US, one step must absolutely not be skipped: roof inspection. Your roof is the crucial barrier between you and whatever nasty weather is out there, which means that any issues with it directly translate into having that same weather invading your home. Having slush or water in your attic is less than fun. And the repair costs of something like that far outweigh the cost of having an inspection done! You do not want to achieve your real estate goals and get your ideal home to sink a ton of money on repairs. It is much better to make timely investments and get professionals to find any leaks and other issues and then fix them before they can grow into something worse. 

Clean out your gutters 

Maintaining your gutters is almost as important. They divert runoff from directly pouring down the sides of your home. This, in turn, protects its integrity and ensures it stays in top condition longer. Without working gutters, you might soon find water has begun seeping into your walls. And the subsequent battle with mold might force you to look into self-storage West Seattle to find safe place for your items. Note that neglecting your gutters can also have other harmful effects. Clogged and dirty gutters become a perfect breeding ground for an infestation. You might also have to deal with some rather nasty insects or animals. In other words, there is a definite reason why gutter cleaning made it onto our home maintenance checklist for fall in the Pacific Northwest, and you should never neglect them! 

Handle your heating system 

Now, there are several different ways you can warm your home up. There’s the city heating system, having your own private furnace and heating system, as well as just relying on ACs working full throttle. Whatever option you end up choosing, your heating system will need some maintenance before fall comes around. If you have one, your chimney and fireplace need to be cleared out and checked over. You might need to release air from your radiator vents to ensure proper circling of hot water in the system. And, in the case of using ACs, you need to replace filters, clean their inner workings, and just check they’re still working properly. Staying warm is, after all, one of the most important things during fall and winter. So, you don’t want your heating system to fail you due to your own laziness!  

Trim tree branches 

If you have a yard with trees near your home, then an essential part of your home maintenance checklist for fall is trimming them. Temperatures rarely get truly extreme in the Pacific Northwest. However, we do still get plenty of strong winds! If trees near your home and their branches brush against your roof or windows, the winds might whip the branches against them. This can easily cause damage you’d need to scramble to fix in hostile weather. This is a crucial point to remember among  things to know before buying a vacation home  since those are not often used and can stay damaged for months. By the time you’d come around to check on the property, the insides of your home would be in very poor shape! 

Ensure there’s no draft 

You don’t want something directly working against your efforts when trying to warm up your home. The presence of drafts does just that. When you don’t have windows or doors open, drafts are caused by the warping of window and door frames, letting outside air slip into your home. This is not just bad for your health and comfort, either. As the experts from PortaBox Storage like to point out, there are plenty of items that are temperature sensitive. Instruments, paintings, and other precious belongings can easily get damaged by these extreme shifts in temperature caused by drafts clashing with warm inside air. Be it for the sake of yourself or your stuff, get any trouble spots that let drafts occur fixed! 

Check on your winter kit 

You will need a couple of things to do maintenance during fall and winter. A trusty shovel. A solid ladder. Mini heaters if you need to do something outside or, in the worst case scenario, unfreeze your car door, etc. And you need to ensure all these things are in working condition before you need them! They will help you keep your home safe, and you won’t need to renovate your house before selling  due to poor maintenance.  

Air out your home 

The final task on our home maintenance checklist for fall in the Pacific Northwest is ensuring your home is aired. Both fall and later winter, as mild as they can be in the Pacific Northwest, are accompanied by unpleasant weather. Meaning that you likely won’t have many chances to leave your windows and balcony doors open. This implies that your home will be rather stuffy during these months. Homes, however, need to ‘breathe’ too. Airing them out ensures it’s much harder for mold and other negative developments to occur. It also helps eliminate dust and foul air, which makes it much more comfortable to spend time inside. Both for the ‘health’ of your home and yourself, it is only wise to make sure your home has one final chance to cleanse itself of stuffiness before the seasons it’ll spend near entirely shuttered. 

Following our home maintenance checklist for fall in the Pacific Northwest, you will be able to finish all the crucial prep work before fall comes around. Just remember, the work you put in will later keep you comfortable!