Three Tips for Preparing Your Home for Winter

Although Cleveland hasn’t really seen any winter yet this year, besides the light dusting of snow that one morning last week, it is coming soon!

If you have a boat, you have taken it out of the water for the winter. If you have a classic car, the cover is on, and it's hibernating in the garage.

Most of Avon’s real estate market is single family homes. You have probably put the patio furniture in the shed, drained the pool, and brought in the yard gnomes in preparation for colder weather and harsh snow storms. That is great, but here are three quick and easy tips that you may not have thought about in the fury of Thanksgiving, holiday shopping, and “winterizing” your home! 

1. If you have a yard, you probably have garden beds, so you probably have flowers, and if you don’t have a personal gardener to water the flowers, you probably have a hose to water those flowers. Make sure you drain all of the hoses, and bring them into the garage. Hoses are meant to have water in the them. When they do, the water gets cold, freezes, and can crack the hoses. Very easy to do, takes 10 minutes tops. But it’s a must in preparing for winter. 
2. Windows, more importantly the screens. Unless you have casement windows (the windows that have the screens on the inside, in which the windows open like a door out of the frame), you probably have single-hung or double-hung windows in which the screens are completely exposed to the elements. Screens are put on windows to keep bugs out when you open the windows. Water is not one of the things a screen can filter out of your home. In winter, we don’t really open our windows, so we are good there. Taking the screens off of the windows are a great way to keep the screens in better shape. When it snows, some snow will get stuck between the window and the screen, when it melts it turns to water, when it gets cold again, it freezes and expands. That is not good for the screens at all! So take them off, store them in the garage or shed. Also, this gives you a good reason while spring cleaning to clean the screens as well. Two pluses out of that tip.
3. Make sure your snow blower is ready before the snow flies. Take it out of the shed, and put it in the garage. Make sure there is oil and and a full tank of gas in it. The worst thing would be to get that first huge snow of the season, and then realize you forgot to change the oil on the snow blower. Once you have done that, start it up, let it run, make sure everything is working properly. Store the snow blower close to the garage door. This will prevent you having to move a vehicle in order to get the snow blower out. Make sure to always have a clear walkway up to your house, you don’t want people to track all that wet snow in the house, or worse, have someone slip and fall. Just clearing the snow should be enough, if you need to use a shovel to break up the ice that’s understandable. Try not to rely on salt to remove the snow and ice from the walkway or driveway. It can be harmful to your cement, especially if you haven’t put a cement sealer on. You could get pits in the cement from the snow. 

Send me your questions regarding real estate, and I'll blog the answer!!

Nolan Andersky

REALTOR, Keller Williams

Nolan.Andersky@Gmail.com