Fall home maintenance checklist

Why fall matters

Cold weather is hard on a house, and the house only gets one chance to be ready. Pipes freeze. Furnaces fail on the first cold morning of the year, when every HVAC company is already booked. Gutters full of leaves overflow and dump water against the foundation.

Fall maintenance is mostly about getting ahead of all of that. The work isn't hard, but the timing matters: do most of it before the first hard freeze.

Outside

The yard work side of fall is the obvious half. There's also the structural half, which matters more.

• Gutters. Twice a year minimum, and once after the leaves drop is non-negotiable in any place with deciduous trees. A gutter full of wet leaves and ice is a gutter that's going to pull off the house, dam up, or send water somewhere it shouldn't go.
• Roof. Walk it visually from the ground. Look for shingles lifted by summer storms, flashing that's pulled away, any branches that fell on it. The roof has to be ready to shed snow and ice; one weak spot is where the trouble starts.
• Walk the foundation. Same as spring. Look for new cracks, anything different from last fall.
• Outdoor faucets. Disconnect the hoses. If you have shutoff valves for the exterior lines (often a small valve inside the basement near each faucet), shut them off and open the outdoor spigot to drain. Frozen water in a connected hose is the most common way a pipe bursts.
• Sprinkler system. If you have one, get it blown out. Compressed air pushes the remaining water out of the lines so it can't freeze and split them. Most irrigation companies offer this; it's a small job that saves a big one.
• Deck and outdoor furniture. Store cushions. Cover or move furniture if you don't want it weathering. If the deck needs a coat of stain or sealer and you missed the spring window, fall before the first frost is the second-best time.
• Trees near the house. Last chance before snow load makes weak branches dangerous. Anything over the roof, anything dead, anything questionable: deal with it now.

Inside

The systems are about to do real work. Make sure they're ready.

• Furnace service. Annual. Do not skip this. A technician cleans the burners, checks the heat exchanger, makes sure the blower is good for another winter. The cost of the service call is small compared to a furnace that quits in January.
• HVAC filter. Fresh one going into heating season. If the system is going to be running near-continuously for the next four months, you want it starting clean. See the filter guide.
• Smoke and CO detectors. Test them. Change batteries. Especially the CO detectors, because winter is when CO incidents happen. A natural-gas furnace running hard is the most common cause; a working detector is the difference between an annoying alarm and a serious problem.
• Reverse the ceiling fans. Most fans have a small switch on the body. Reversed (clockwise when viewed from below), the fan pulls cold air up and pushes warm air down the walls. Small effect, free to do.
• Check the weatherstripping. Doors and windows. If you can feel a draft, replace the strip. Hardware-store strips cost a few dollars and pay for themselves in one winter.
• Attic insulation. Walk the attic. If the insulation is thin, uneven, or has gaps near eaves and around penetrations, it's worth addressing. Heat lost through the attic is heat you're paying for twice.

Pipes and freeze prep

This is the section that prevents the most expensive winter incidents. If you skip everything else on this list, do these:

• Disconnect outdoor hoses (mentioned above, but worth repeating).
• Insulate exposed pipes in unheated spaces: garage, crawlspace, exterior walls. Foam pipe insulation is cheap.
• Find your main water shutoff and make sure you can turn it. If you've never turned it, do a test. A seized shutoff during a burst pipe is a bad surprise.
• Know which faucets to drip on the coldest nights. Generally any fixture on an exterior wall, especially if the run between fixture and shutoff goes through unheated space.

See the cold-weather prep guide for the full version, including what to do on the day of an actual cold snap.

Systems

A few annual items that often land in fall:

• Water heater flush. If you haven't this year. Same logic as spring; sediment hurts efficiency.
• Dryer vent. Pull the dryer out and vacuum the lint trap and the hose. Lint is flammable, and a clogged dryer vent is one of the more common house-fire causes.
• Chimney and fireplace. If you use it, get the chimney swept before the first fire. Creosote buildup is real and it does cause fires.

What you can skip

• Window plastic for every window. Useful for a leaky old house. Overkill for a modern one with good windows. Check the actual draft first.
• Re-staining the deck if the existing coat still beads water. Stain when it stops beading, not on a calendar.
• Replacing the furnace filter mid-season if the filter is still clean. Look at it; don't replace by date alone.

Putting it together

Most of the list is a long Saturday and a couple of short evenings. The hard part is the timing: pipes don't care that you're busy. Do the freeze-related stuff before the first hard cold snap and the rest is flexible.

If you'd like the cold-weather warnings to come to you instead of having to remember, Stell watches the forecast and gives you one heads-up email before a freeze. Then you can do the prep, ignore it if you've already done it, and move on. See also the spring checklist for the other half of the year.