Today, let’s discuss the five home tips you should tackle before the winter season arrives in full. If you’re thinking about selling your home—or even if you’re not just yet—these tips about home maintenance will help you prepare for the winter months.
1. Protect your pipes and take care of your hoses, pools, and other external water features. Even though we live in Georgia, where it rarely gets below freezing, the temperature does dip down there. Covers for spigots are available at most hardware stores. Also be aware that other external features of your home during those cold times as well. Wrapping them in a cover or some type of insulation can go a long way in protecting them from freeze-related damages. Additionally, drain your hoses and store them away for the season.
2. Take care of your kitchen appliances. By cleaning such appliances as your oven, you can prevent fires and smoking while you cook for the holidays, as well as prolonging the life of those appliances.
3. Check the insulation in your house. Most of the heat that is gained and lost in your house comes from the roof line, so places like your attic are especially important for you to check on. If you’re looking for an upgrade, blown insulation is a simple process, and open cell foam insulation is an inexpensive method that can truly seal your attic, enabling it to hold in heat during the cold periods and keep heat out during the summer. Doing so can dramatically lower your energy bill.
4. Make sure your decorations are safe. It’s a very common tradition to put up Christmas trees for the holidays and string them with lights. Since for most of the year these lights are casually thrown into storage, checking the strings for splices in the wires is an easy way of preventing fires. Even during the holidays, safety should be a primary concern.
5. Take extra security precautions. Statistically speaking, burglaries tend to spike during the holidays. One of the reasons for this is that we actually make it easier nowadays, given that we often order things from Amazon Prime or similar online services where the packages are delivered to our door. This makes your packages easy targets for burglars. Do your due diligence by leaving a note for your package provider to place packages at a rear door of the house, having your neighbors take in your packages for you, or you could even install a doorbell with a camera that informs you when someone is in front of your house.
In addition to these tips, we also want to thank you for all you’ve done for us in 2017, including those of you who made it out to the Thanksgiving pie event. We were happy to see you all out there and got a chance to catch up. We look forward to an awesome 2018.
If there’s a question or topic you’d like us to address, reply to this email or give us a call, and we’ll be glad to cover that for you.
