5 ways to prepare your home for the New Year

Posted on Monday, December 19th, 2016

The New Year can be a good time to give your home a revamp, or even just a subtle refresh. After all, with Christmas just behind you, it’s likely that a lot of free time has opened up. Whether you simply want to, so to speak, blow the cobwebs off your home or make the building look better in preparation for selling it, we can help. Here are five things that you can make a priority of doing.

Make the building more resilient to winter weather

While the New Year means saying goodbye to Christmas, the winter certainly isn’t gone. Therefore, there could be a lot of fiercely cold weather on the way — and, to better protect your home against the elements, you could thoroughly clean out the gutters and reattach loose parts. You could also seal the edges of exterior doors and windows to stop water leaking and cold air seeping in.

Prepare in case an emergency happens

The future can be hard to predict, but you can prepare you and your family for any unexpected emergency. You can, for example, make sure that your house includes sufficient drinking water for keeping every household member, including pets, supplied for three to four days. You could also check that your house has warm clothes, blankets, canned food, a can opener, cash and spare batteries.

Be smarter with how you heat your home

If your home doesn’t already have a programmable thermostat, install one. It will enable you to significantly trim your cooling and heating costs by preparing the extent to which it will heat your home and during what time intervals. You could even get hold of a thermostat that will allow you to control it from an app on your smartphone or tablet.

Look over your home’s smoke and CO alarms

Here, we mean that you should test those alarms and replace batteries that are running low on power. You should also look at each alarm’s manufacturing date. Consumer Reports says that you should replace each smoke alarm every ten years and each CO (carbon monoxide) alarm every five years. Furthermore, arrange — if you haven’t already — for a CO alarm on each of your home’s levels and a smoke alarm in each bedroom and hallway, plus the attic and basement.

Pick up eco-friendly practices to save money

There are lots of little things that you can do in the building to lower both your carbon footprint and your energy bills. These include switching lights off when leaving a room and turning off air conditioning before you are about to leave the house. You could remind yourself to do all of this by putting notes next to the relevant switches.