New Decade, New You: Get Started On Home Maintenance
The new decade has crept up on us extremely quickly. It’s finally setting in that an era has ended. While every New Year has its resolutions, 2020 feels much more symbolic. A fresh start. Therefore, New Year’s home maintenance should be bumped to the top of your resolutions list. These tips will help you stay on track with your home maintenance throughout the new year.
Common New Year’s Home Maintenance To Be Aware Of
Home maintenance is a full time job. In the past, home maintenance may not have been at the top of your list of resolutions for the new year. However, it’s never too late to start. Keep your home in great shape, saving yourself the struggle. You may also be saving yourself some money in the long run; home maintenance helps to avoid extra costly repairs. Start the year off right by performing a few simple New Year’s home maintenance tasks that you can do every month to stay on top of it.
Some common New Year’s home maintenance to add to your routine include:
- Safety Checks: One of the most important home maintenance tasks to perform is a safety check. This ensures that, in the unlikely event of some kind of emergency, you and your family will be safe. Replace the batteries in your smoke detectors, as well as your carbon monoxide detectors. Ensure that these devices are in proper working order. You should also always have a fire extinguisher on hand, as well as a first aid kit. As the saying goes: better safe than sorry.
- Check For Leaks and Drafts: Since you won’t be able to get much done outdoors just yet, winter is a
great time for indoor home maintenance. Checking for leaks and drafts around your home can help prevent costly damage in the future. As for leakage, inspect areas around your shower/tub, toilets, sinks, and pipes. Repair these leaks as quickly as possible, lest they begin to cause mold damage. Drafts are generally found around windows and doors, and should also be repaired with haste. Not only do drafts allow cold air to enter your home, they can also drive up your energy bill. You’ll have to crank the heat in order to compensate for the cold that the draft is letting in. Allowing a draft to go unfixed is like throwing money out the window – literally!
- Shampoo Your Carpets: Remembering to shampoo your carpets can sometimes be swept under the rug. (Pun intended.) While this is something that doesn’t need to be done all the time, it doesn’t hurt every once in a while. It can seem like an intimidating feat, considering all the surfaces you’ll have to cover. However, adding this to your new year’s home maintenance checklist will have you feeling very accomplished. You might as well get as much done as possible while you’re on that resolution kick.
- Inspect HVAC System: It’s still winter, of course. You want to make sure that your HVAC/heating system is in good working order. Clean or replace the filters of your system to ensure clean, pure air coming through.
- Purge Your Home: The start of a new year is the perfect time to clean and declutter your home. Go through all your stuff (clothes, shoes, knick knacks, etc.) and see what you may not need to hang onto anymore. Clean up any and all messes and clutter, and start the new year off on the right foot.
- Inspect Attic & Basement: Your home’s attic and basement tend to be more vulnerable to issues than other areas of the home. They both are rather stuffy, due to improper ventilation. Something you can do to change that this year is to assess your attic/basement needs, and move forward from there. If the areas tend to be too damp and musty, you may want to consider employing the use of a good dehumidifier. On the opposite end of the spectrum, these areas could be suffering from humidity levels that are too low. Your home’s ideal humidity level should be between 35%-50%. The basement/attic areas tend to be the most finicky, so you may want to give them a little more attention this year.
Home Maintenance Throughout The Year
The beginning of a new year is a great time to get started on home maintenance. Everyone feels motivated to accomplish their goals in the beginning of the year, but they can occasionally fall flat. However, don’t let home maintenance become a failed New Year’s resolution. Keep that new year’s home maintenance energy flowing throughout the year. You will thank yourself in the long run.
