The reason printed maintenance checklists end up in a drawer is that they are written as one list of forty items. Faced with forty items, a person does the four they were already worried about and abandons the rest, and next year they start again from zero.
What follows is arranged by when each job has to happen rather than by category, because timing is what makes maintenance cheap. A gutter cleaned in November costs an hour. The same gutter, cleaned in March after a winter of overflow soaked the sheathing behind the fascia, is a carpentry job.
The five minutes that belong to every month
Four things, and none takes long.
- Test one smoke alarm and one carbon monoxide alarm. Rotate through them so each gets tested a couple of times a year. A dead battery is the ordinary reason an alarm is silent on the night it matters. While you have it down, read the manufacture date stamped on the back. These units expire, ten years is the usual life, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission's recall notices are worth a search if yours are older than that.
- Look at the water heater and the area under it. You are checking for rust streaks, damp on the floor, and anything stored against it. A tank that is going to fail usually announces itself for weeks.
- Run water in any drain nobody uses. A guest bathroom trap that dries out lets sewer gas into the house, and thirty seconds of water refills it.
- Walk the perimeter and look at the ground next to the foundation. Soil should fall away from the house. It settles over the years and eventually starts sending water the wrong way.
Late winter, before anything thaws
February is a good month for the indoor jobs nobody wants to do in summer.
Change the furnace filter, and check what size it is while you have it out so you can buy a year of them at once. A restricted filter makes the system work harder and shortens the life of the most expensive appliance in the house.
Look at the attic on a cold morning. Frost on the underside of the roof sheathing means warm air is getting up there, which is an insulation and air-sealing problem rather than a roof problem, and it is much cheaper to solve than the roof damage it eventually causes.
Check under every sink with a flashlight, including the back corners. Slow leaks from supply connections are the single most common source of the damage that shows up later as a soft floor.
Spring, once the ground has dried
Walk the roof line from the ground with binoculars. Missing shingles, lifted flashing around the chimney, sagging gutters, a vent boot with cracked rubber. You are making a list to price, not fixing anything from a ladder.
Clear the gutters and then, on the next rainy day, go outside and watch them work. This is the step people skip, and it is where the problem shows itself: water sheeting over the front edge, a downspout emptying against the foundation, a section pitched the wrong way.
Tip a bucket of water into the sump pit and watch the pump come on. Check that the discharge line still runs somewhere sensible. Then find out what happens if the power fails, because storms take out both at once.
Service the air conditioning before the first hot week rather than during it. A technician in April comes tomorrow. The same technician in July comes in nine days, and charges more to do it.
Summer, while the weather is dry
Summer is exterior season and the work is mostly about keeping water off things.
Look at the caulk around windows and doors, the seal where a deck meets the house, and the trim on the sunny side, which fails first. Paint on wood is a waterproofing layer that happens to have a color; when it opens up, the wood behind it starts absorbing rain.
Cut vegetation back to a foot from the siding. Plants against a wall hold moisture there, block airflow and give insects a bridge over anything you have treated at ground level.
Flush the water heater if yours is a tank model and you have never done it. Sediment settles at the bottom, insulates the burner from the water, and takes years off the life of the tank.
Test the outdoor spigots for a dribble at the handle and check the hoses for splits before the pressure finds them for you.
Fall, in the four weeks before the first freeze
This is the busiest window and the one with the hardest deadline.
Disconnect and drain every hose, shut off the interior valve to each outdoor spigot, and open the spigot to drain the line. A frozen hose bib splits inside the wall and does not reveal itself until spring, when someone turns the water on and it comes out of the ceiling.
Clean the gutters again after the leaves are down rather than while they are falling.
Have the heating system serviced, and ask the technician to check the flue and combustion as well as the burner. If you have a fireplace or a wood stove in use, this is when the chimney gets swept.
Walk the driveway and the steps and look for cracks that will hold water, freeze, and become a foot wider by March. A tube of the right filler is a ten-minute job in October and a concrete estimate in April.
The jobs worth paying someone to do
Three categories, and the reasoning is the same in each.
Anything on a steep roof or above the second story, because the fall is what kills people, not the work. Anything involving gas or a flue, because a mistake there produces carbon monoxide rather than a visible failure. And anything inside an electrical panel, where the parts stay live with the main breaker off.
Beyond safety, pay for the jobs where a professional sees things you cannot. A heating technician has looked inside a thousand furnaces and recognizes the sound of a failing inducer motor. That recognition is most of what the service call buys, and it is why booking it in September rather than after a breakdown is worth the same money at a much lower stress level.
The things that fail without warning, and what to know before they do
Some of this list is about preventing failures. A smaller part is about being ready for the ones nobody prevents.
Know where the main water shutoff is, and exercise it once a year: a quarter turn closed, a quarter turn back. A valve that has not moved since the house was built often will not move at two in the morning either, and the difference between a wet floor and a wet ceiling downstairs is usually two minutes.
Know which breaker feeds what. Half an hour with a lamp and a marker, once, produces a labeled panel that saves an hour every future time.
Know the ages of the four appliances that flood houses: the water heater, the washing machine, the dishwasher and the refrigerator with an ice maker. Write the install year on a piece of tape stuck to each one. A water heater in its twelfth year is not an emergency, but it is a reason to price a replacement now rather than choose one on a Sunday from whoever answers the phone.
Replace rubber washing machine hoses with braided steel ones. It is a twenty-minute job with a wrench, the parts cost less than a takeout meal, and burst hoses are one of the more common household water losses.
Making it survive contact with a real year
Pick the four dates now and put them in the phone calendar with a reminder a week ahead: February, April, July, October. Everything above hangs on one of those four weekends plus five minutes a month.
Two of the four are worth pairing with something else so they actually happen. The fall one goes with the last barbecue of the year, the spring one with the first day warm enough to want to be outside. A list that is attached to a day people already look forward to gets done far more often than one attached to a resolution.