You’re getting ready to put the house on the market.  You call your Real Estate Professional to stop by to do the paperwork, with the notion you ought to ask her whether or not to replace the carpet, paint the kids’ bedrooms, patch the fence, replace the blinds… You want to get the most you can for your home without spending too much up front on the repairs that have been mounting up, but there are two other homes right there on your block already listed for sale.  Can you get your asking price?  Are you going to be able to stand out from the competition?  And how much is it going to cost?

The price tags on some fixes are generally worth it down the road in the form of a better sales price, and/or your home selling faster.  These are repairs like flooring, paint, kitchen appliances and cabinets.  The key to keep in mind here is the average buyer doesn’t want to move into a new home that has mounting deferred maintenance they know they will end up having to deal with.  There is one easy home repair you can do prior to listing your home for sale that won’t cost you anything but your time.  And if you’ve ever had a child throw a football or kick a soccer ball indoors this article is probably for you.

Do you have mini blinds with unsightly bent slats?  You know what I’m talking about, most of the slats line up, overlapping nicely to let in or keep out sunlight, or maintain privacy.  Then one Saturday your son, or daughter, or grandchild, (or spouse) was playing with the football indoors.  One bounce against the delicate slats is all it takes to bend or break multiple slats.  And attempting to bend aluminum slats back into shape often makes things worse.

Repairing window blinds with bent or broken slats is much simpler than it looks.  Because most mini blinds are manufactured to fit different-sized windows by adding extra slats at the bottom, this repair is almost as easy as threading a needle.  This video shows you how to shorten mini blinds, and to replace broken or bent slats you will follow this same procedure with the added step of replacing damaged slats with extra slats from the bottom.  Many repairs like restringing, broken continuous or end controls, and replacing tilters on vertical and mini blinds, and pleated shades are easy to tackle with help from this short video that illustrates solutions for the most common problems encountered with blinds.

So fix your blinds, save your money, and tell your spouse to take the football outside.

If you’re considering selling your home, the first question is do you have any paint left over from when you bought the house?  If your home is relatively young you may still have a can or two left over in the basement or garage from when the builder originally finished the interior.  If so, do you have enough to paint the kid’s room(s)?  Maybe you don’t necessarily need to paint everything.  Are there only a couple of specific rooms that need attention? 

If you don’t have any leftover paint, or the job is going to require purchasing more paint, here’s the cardinal rule for painting to sell:  One neutral color.  That says it all.  Choose beige.  Choose eggshell.  Choose (insert your favorite sandy off-white color here), but choose just one color.  And yes, make it neutral.  A new coat of taupe paint may not be the feature that excites buyers to the point of writing an offer, but the alternatives sure may turn them away.  Go neutral.

If you’re maintaining investment property, use one color, just like above, but taken one step further.  Use one color for all your investment properties.  That way you don’t have to try match paint for each room in each house.  One color, across the board.  And make sure it’s semi-gloss so you will have an easier clean up in between tenants.  One-color semi-gloss means less time on maintenance, and quicker turn-around time for getting new paying tenants moved in.  This is one of those situations where time truly is money.

If you’re preparing to paint the interior of your home this spring, the first question I would ask you is, “What are you painting for?” I don’t mean to suggest you avoid the project, or switch from paint to wallpaper.  I’m asking first if you’re painting for yourself, because you want to brighten up the family room, or because you’ve always wanted a lavender bedroom suite.  Maybe you’re planning for a move, and you’re painting to clean up the walls before listing your home for sale.  Maybe you’re painting the walls in a rental property you own as part of your investment portfolio.  What are you painting for?  If…

You're doing it for yourself – You’ve always wanted mango walls in the dining room, chestnut in the study, and yes, lavender in the master bedroom.  Ask yourself a few planning questions up front.  What’s the scope of your project?  Are you doing one room?  Two?  Ten?  I won’t tell you not to use ten colors in ten different rooms, but I will ask you to reconsider.  Think less is more.  Too many colors can make a home feel chaotic.  This video will help you understand the basics of color scheming, line-of-sight combinations (standing in your mango kitchen and looking through the archway into your chestnut study, for example), and proper pairing of wall color with a room’s accents and furnishings.

You can spend as much or as little time as you like just deciding colors.  One of the best ways I’ve found to help the process is what I call “living with it.”  Once you and your spouse have narrowed your choices for any particular room down to, say, your top three, get a sample of each of the choices.  Paint a six by six inch square patch of wall, larger if you like, with each of the colors on a section of wall where every time you step into the room you see the choices.  Then “live with it” for a few days, or a week, or a month.  Try to monitor your initial reaction to the colors each time you step into the room.  Which color jumps out and grabs you?  Do you find your eyes drawn to one color over the others?  How about your other family members or co-habitants?  What do they think?

Next time I’ll have some tips for choosing paint colors when you’re preparing to sell your home and when maintaining rental/income properties.

Maybe your family is growing, or one day you woke up to discover you and your spouse are empty nesters.  Either way, you’ve decided the time is right to put the house on the market.  There’s just one problem: the distress caused by all the hubbub and showings to potential buyers at all hours of the day hasn’t gone unnoticed by the family cat, who is suddenly doing his business everywhere but in the box.  To make sure your feline cooperates with keeping the house clean, you’ll need an out-of-the-box solution.  You don’t have to look much further than an old real estate maxim: Location, location, location.

Be sure to move the cat box to a nice private area of the home.  Cats like to be alone when nature calls; that’s why it’s important to keep the litter box out of high-traffic areas.  You will want to continue prohibiting the family dog from having free access hovering about the box as well.  The key is putting the litter box in a location where it’s neither the very first thing buyers see when entering your home, nor the very last thing they see before they leave.  Negative first and last impressions are difficult to overcome when accompanied by unpleasant odors.  If you keep this in mind, you’re likely to place the box where the kitty will be happier as well.

Place an old area rug or carpet remnant under the box.  Cats love to dig and scratch around the litter box; tile, hardwood, or basement cement floors aren’t the best choice.  The texture of a rug under paw makes the litter box that much more attractive to the cat, likely helping you to reaffirm that as the place to go when it comes to doing his duty.  Likewise, you can place a few sheets of aluminum foil in areas where kitty may have had recent accidents.  As much as cats love the feel of a rug under their paws, they hate the feel of aluminum foil.  Hide the foil before showings, and return it to problem spots afterwards until kitty becomes retrained to the new box location.

Click here for more dos and don’ts on re-training your cat to his litter box.

This is NOT a do-it-yourself project to take on ill-advised.  Garage door torsion springs are under a tremendous amount of torque, and their replacement poses a serious safety hazard.  I’m certain there are a number of you out there who will choose to do this home repair yourself.  My hope with this article is that by helping you understand how the garage door and springs work together you will eventually decide to just go ahead and call in a professional should your garage door springs ever break and need replacing.

Standard 16 X 7 garage doors can weigh 150-200 pounds or more, so don’t think for a minute that little garage door opener from Sears is doing the heavy lifting on its own.  In fact, the counterweight created by the torsion springs balance against the weight of the door so all the opener has to do is give that little extra umph to raise and lower the door on its guide tracks.  Take away the springs and you have a giant guillotine on your hands.

Most two-bay garage doors use two torsion springs to get the job done.  Even so, after thousands of ups and downs they still can break.  When they do, one or the other spring can snap, usually not both at the same time.  If the break happens while the door is part way up gravity will take over and the door will come crashing down.  That is why it is always important to stand clear of a garage door whenever it is in operation.  That goes double for children and pets!

Still not convinced?  Watch this video starting at about the 45 second mark.  It shows a torsion spring wound to the point of snapping.  Imagine that force behind one of the winding bars in these videos.  At a minimum that’s a trip to the emergency room for a broken hand.

Here’s your garage door safety checklist.

You can always purchase a pre-assembled first aid kit that will contain most of what you’ll need for first response situations at home.  The downside is these kits can be more costly than assembling one yourself, and you’re subject to whatever the manufacturer decided to include with their product.

Here’s a great video on putting together your own first aid kit.  You’ll want to start with a container that’s large enough to keep all the supplies together in one place, yet highly portable so the kit can be moved easily from room to room and even outside for outdoor accidents.  Tackle boxes are always a great choice.  Here’s a list of the standard items to include in your first aid kit compliments of the Red Cross.  For home kits, one item worth including that is often overlooked is a flashlight.  When assembling your kit keep in mind the types of activities you and your family often participate in.  For example, if your family hikes and camps frequently be sure to stock supplies in your kit to address campfire burns, poison ivy, and insect bites.

If you’re assembling a travel kit think about including an old cell phone and charger.  Most adults have cell phones nowadays, but this will insure you always have a phone handy in an emergency.  I found this great webpage worth sharing with your family on tips for calling 911 from a cell phone.  It’s completely different from calling from home, and knowing the difference in an emergency, as they say, is priceless.

A running toilet is not just an annoying intrusion on an otherwise nice, quiet evening at home, it is also a hidden water waster, which you can translate as money waster.  Whenever you hear the toilet running, I want you to picture water coming into your home from your utility provider, through the home’s web-work of plumbing and into the top of the toilet’s water tank, then flowing right back out the bottom of the tank, down the waste-water line, never to be seen nor heard from again…until the arrival of your next monthly water bill.

The bad news: you have a defective/damaged flapper.  The good news: it’s an easy and inexpensive fix you can do yourself.  And what’s more, you won’t need any tools!  How’s that for a do-it-yourself project?

Turning off the water fill valve behind the toilet will make inspecting the current flapper much easier.  You’re looking for evidence that either the chain is too short, there is something obstructing the flapper thus keeping it from properly sealing against the water drain seat, or simply a damaged flapper.  This video will help you identify exactly what’s happening in your case.  If by chance it’s not the flapper that’s the problem, here are some other possible common issues with toilets that are relatively easy to diagnose and fix yourself.

Happy plumbing!

For most of us the laundry room is “Out of sight, out of mind.”  When we clean the house the rooms generally tackled first are those we frequent most (like the kitchen and bedrooms) or areas in the home that we might expect visitors to see (like the family room and bathrooms).  If the laundry room is an afterthought, what does that make the unseen accumulation of dust and lint in your dryer vent?  One word: dangerous.  Periodic cleaning of your dryer vent is a great habit to get into.  The problem is you just have to remember to do it – every year.  That or someone has to remind you.

Consider this your reminder.

Over 15,000 fires happen in clothes dryers annually, and the vast majority of them are attributed to poor cleaning and upkeep.  Daily, newspapers around the country run articles about dryer vent fires and their devastating effect on local families.  15 deaths and over 300 injuries happen every year in clogged dryer vent fires in residential buildings.

Experts recommend having your dryer duct and vent cleaned out at least annually.  It’s all too easy to overlook some of these infrequent yet necessary home safety maintenance chores.  Again, the reason for this reminder.  I recommend grouping this task with other annual or semi-annual home maintenance jobs like changing the backup batteries in smoke alarms and emergency flashlights, or inspecting your fire extinguisher.  Schedule this group of tasks into your computer or cell phone calendar, or pencil it in on the tried-and-true printed calendar on the front of your refrigerator.

This is a continuation of our last blog, “Packing and the Move (Part 1)”.

1. Use your move as an opportunity to de-clutter.  We all have stuff we have been hanging onto for far too long.  Clothes we no longer wear, or that have been out of style for decades; that old barbershop chair in the basement gathering dust; VHS tapes, rotary phones, vinyl record albums.  Some of it may very well be collectable.  Some of it may just be gathering dust.  Have a garage sale, and donate any leftover stuff.  Now’s the time to pull out everything that really has no business on the back of a moving truck, and no place in your new home.  Use the proceeds from your garage sale to buy pizza for lunch for your moving crew.
2. Have a toolbox handy for taking apart bed frames, tightening loose screws, removing wall-hanging hardware, and the like.  Be sure to have one or more box cutters in the tool set for unpacking, and be sure the toolbox is placed in a central location in your new home on move-in day, like the kitchen, so you don’t have to look for tools when it comes time to reassemble bed frames, for example, at the end of an exhausting day.
3. Use blankets to drape over delicate surfaces like electronics and furniture to prevent breakage and scratching.  Plastic garbage bags full of t-shirts or towels are excellent for stabilizing fragile items in the back of the moving truck, as are couch cushions and bed pillows.
4. Ask for help.  Moving is by all means a daunting job, so don’t be shy.  Friends, neighbors, family – even the children!  If you’re worried about things getting broken then handle the computer monitor and your great-grandmother’s antique full-length mirror yourself.  Enlist more troops to handle the rest of the grunt work.  Children can help more than we often give them credit for.  They can carry smaller boxes, or at a minimum babysit the family dog in the back yard while the adults take care of all the lifting.  Kids love to feel included in all the excitement, and to have their own very special job assigned to them is all it takes.

This by no means is a comprehensive list of helpful tips to ensure a successful move for your family.  Check out this detailed checklist for additional useful information.

It takes more than boxes and tape for a successful move into a new home – it takes planning, organization, and a little help.  Here is the first of two beefy installments with some packing and moving tips that will ensure a minimum-stress, minimum-trouble, maximum-efficiency move.

1. Start early.  Begin saving empty boxes well in advance of the big day.  Visit local grocery stores and ask for their good used boxes; be sure to take a pass on boxes that have produce residue or traces of odor.  Purchase good packing tape; duct tape doesn’t adhere very well to a cardboard surface.  You want to make sure what you put inside the box stays there until you’re ready to unpack.  Visit your dry cleaner and ask for some used plastic garment bags.  These can be used to protect clothing on hangers from dust; and tied off at one end, they double as trash bags.
2. Pack up any off-season belongings you may have first.  If you’re moving in June, go ahead and pack up your Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations, and winter weather wardrobe.  The more you can get done ahead of time, the better.
3. Pack heavier items, like books or music CDs in smaller boxes; pack lighter items in larger boxes.  The fewer boxes you have to move the better, however you don’t want to pack boxes so heavy you risk a back injury.  Be sure to securely tape boxes as well.  We’ve already covered this, AND it bears mentioning again.  An over-packed box bursting open on its way to the moving truck is not the way to start moving day.
4. When packing, label the box with a permanent marker for the room it is being moved into, not the room it is moving out of.  You may have two children currently sharing one room who will now each get their own bedroom in the new house, or you may have decided to store some items from your basement into your new spacious garage.  Label individual boxes for the appropriate destination room.

Check back next week for Part 2 of “Packing and the Move” for more tips.  In the meantime, here’s a great comprehensive moving checklist to help keep important tasks from falling through the cracks.

The most common place for a fire to start inside the home is the kitchen; the garage and laundry room come in at second and third.  It makes sense though, right?  The kitchen’s the room that’s home to the range top, the oven, and multiple electric appliances.  But not all in-home fires are the same.  The kitchen is not only the most likely place for an accidental fire, it is also the location most susceptible to the widest variety of fires.  Before I go any further, if you have an in-home fire and your clothes happen to catch fire STOP, DROP, AND ROLL! And if the flames are high and out of control GET OUT OF YOUR HOUSE AND GET TO SAFETY FIRST, THEN CALL 911!  Don’t risk your life.  There’s no sense in anyone getting hurt.  Things can be replaced; people can’t.  That said, here are the three most common types of small in-home fires and the best method for putting them out.

1. Wood, paper, cloth fire: Put out the flames with water or a class A fire extinguisher.
2. Grease fire: Use baking soda or a class B extinguisher.  If the fire is in a pan, slide a lid over the top first to smother the flames and turn off the heat.  DO NOT USE WATER!  Water will only make a grease fire spread.
3. Electric fire: Baking soda or a class C extinguisher.  Again, no water.

Home fire extinguishers should have an ABC rating to cover most home fires.

It’s crazy to think that most families do not practice their emergency escape plan, let alone have a plan in place.  Statistically speaking, the most common home emergency requiring a family to evacuate is the house fire, so any emergency plan should take into consideration fire contingencies.  Here are a couple key pointers for your family’s emergency escape plan:

1. Plan your escape.  Create a plan that quickly and efficiently gets your family out of the house.  Designate primary and secondary exits, as well as a neighbor’s house as the destination everyone should head to for safety and for placing the call to 911.
2. Practice your escape.  This is as crucial a step for adults as it is for children.  Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.  Children can be easily confused in an emergency.  Add the emotional trauma of an unexpected fire in the house and even mature adults can panic.  Practice the escape plan from the fire alarm all the way to your neighbor’s doorstep.
3. Minimize risks in the home.  Test fire alarms and CO detectors, and change out backup batteries.  Clean build-up out of the bottom of your stove and grill, and never leave pots and pans unattended on range burners.  Get a fire extinguisher, make sure everyone knows where it is in the house (in or close to the kitchen), and have it inspected regularly.

The US has been using low flow shower heads to varying degrees of success since the 1990s when the federal government legislated their use.  The early models did decrease water usage from 5-7 gallons a minute to the mandated 2.5 gallons a minute; however, the problem back then was that decreased water flow also often meant decreased water pressure.  So when it took you longer to rinse off soap residue due to low water pressure, your shower time became longer, in turn bringing water usage back up – kind of self-defeating.

Today’s low flow shower heads not only decrease water consumption, they stabilize water pressure and save you money on your water heating bill since you’re heating less water.  Check out these comparisons of the pre-1990 shower heads to the various incarnations that followed.  How does the shower head work?  There are two kinds of low flow shower heads, aerated and non-aerated.  The first kind uses air to pressurize the water stream, while the second maintains water pressure by pulsating water through separate water jet streams.

Let’s say your family takes a conservative total of three showers a day.  If you switch from a 2.5-gallon-per-minute fixture to a 1.5-gpm fixture, that’s a savings of 21 gallons every day.  And what if your shower head is still one of those pre ’90s water wasters?  You could be saving over 100 gallons a day by replacing it with a low flow unit.  Let’s see, in a thirty-day month that comes to 3,000 gallons of water NOT down the drain!

Whether you’re a first time home buyer or you’ve been through the home buying process many times before, do yourself a favor.  Make speaking to a mortgage lender one of your first priorities when beginning your new house hunt.

Unless you have substantial savings and liquid assets, you’re probably like most people and need to get a mortgage in order to move into that dream house.  There are many reasons for speaking to a mortgage lender or mortgage broker up front.  A professional who deals everyday in these types of loans will know what the current rates are.  They will take into consideration your credit scores, monthly income, available savings for a down payment, and best available interest rate based on all your information to come up with the loan amount you qualify for.

Please understand the primary benefit here: education.  This is a process not to be taken lightly.  The lender’s job is not to put you into the biggest house (and by association the biggest loan) possible.  Their job is to counsel.  Through the interview process they learn about your financial situation and determine your expected ability to repay the loan over the five, fifteen, even thirty year term.  The lender can also let you know whether there are some items on your credit reports that are getting in the way of your getting a better interest rate, or simply getting in the way of your qualifying for the loan altogether.

The mortgage market has changed over the last few years, and it has become more difficult to get that ideal loan.  Today you need more money for the down payment than you may have needed in the past, and guidelines for qualification are stricter than ever.  Speak to a mortgage professional you trust.  If you don’t have one, speak to friends, family and neighbors.  Ask who they have used in the past and what the experience was like.  Ask your friendly neighborhood Realtor® for a list of reputable candidates.  The last thing you want to happen is to find your dream home, write and have your offer accepted by the sellers, then discover you can’t get the mortgage to complete the purchase.  Get pre-qualified first, and house hunt with confidence.

This one is kind of fun: coffee as fertilizer.  Yep, coffee grounds (and tea grounds and tea bags for that matter) provide an excellent source of nitrogen for your indoor and outdoor plants, transplants, lawn, and vegetable gardens.  There are many ways to use it as well.  You can add coffee grounds directly to soil for a slow release effect, or mix them with a bucket of water prior to watering plants as a more fast acting fertilizer.  Coffee grounds can be mixed in with your composting material, as well as utilized for some if its pest deterrent qualities.  The rule of thumb out there is that plants that thrive in acidic soil generally prosper with this kind of additive. 

What’s more, you can get coffee grounds from local restaurants and coffee shops to use at home.  Starbucks has made five pound bags of used grounds available to customers for free through its Grounds for Gardens program since 1995.  If you’re not close enough to a Starbucks (hard to imagine in the world today that anyone isn’t within a ten or fifteen minute drive) call around to your local restaurants and ask if they save coffee grounds for their patrons’ use.  What’s good for the garden is also good for the landfill.

The root of the problem with indoor mold is moisture.  You find mold in your home, you clean it up, right?  But if you don’t find and fix the moisture issue the mold will return.  The source of moisture might be as easy to find as a leaking pipe under the sink or in the basement.  It may be a little more difficult to identify like a leaking pipe inside a wall.  And again, diagnosing the moisture problem is one thing, yet prescribing the correct and complete remedy may be the tricky part as with a cracked foundation wall in your basement or crawlspace.  One thing is certain, if you only treat the symptom (the mold) the illness (moisture) will continue to rear its troublesome head. 

Once you discover mold in your home get to work on mitigating the source of moisture and the clean-up right away.  Don’t ignore it.  Call a plumber with a good reputation in the community if you need to.  Simply closing the cabinet door to the kitchen sink and pretending it’s not there doesn’t work.  The problem won’t just walk away on its own and neither should you.  And don’t simply paint over the stain of a recently cleaned patch or wall without mitigating the moisture.  You’re putting more energy into a problem that will continue to reoccur. 

So the question is, Where to begin?  A great place to start if you’re unsure just how to get started is the Frequently Asked Questions on the http://www.epa.gov/ website.  Stop the moisture, stop the mold.

Houseplants bring a little touch of the outdoors inside, and unlike our house pets they require considerably less attention.  But that doesn’t mean a once a week watering is all it takes to earn your green thumb. 

1. The single most important factor for a plant to survive and thrive is its environment.  Here I’m speaking about sunlight.  Inside the home sunlight becomes all that much more important as your plants spend twenty-four hours a day under your roof and not outside in the great wide open.  Use the handy table at the bottom of this webpage to determine the best locations based on plant type to make sure your plants are getting adequate sun.
2. The size of your plant’s container is another environmental issue.  You want your pot to be large enough to accommodate the soil and roots.  Too small a pot will restrict your growth.  Too large a pot, compared to the plant making its home there, may look a bit unbalanced or awkward in the room.  Here are some creative plant container ideas.
3. Fertilizer, too much or not enough, can cause problems.  Signs that your plant needs fertilizer are dropped leaves, pale leaves, flimsy stems, and little or no new growth.  Likewise, signs that your plant is getting too much fertilizer are leaves with a “burned” appearance or dark spots, odd shaped leaves, and a white residue that accumulates on the surface of your potting soil. 

With a little TLC for your plants, you’ll be greening up indoors and freshening your environment.

Cross country or across town, sometimes it pays to hire a moving company to do the heavy lifting.  Did you know moving companies often offer more services than just hauling your belongings to your new home?  Many have packing and unpacking services.  I’ve even seen some offer a house cleaning service to give the home you’re moving into a good once-over before you arrive.  It’s important not only to know what options you have available to help make your move run smoother, but also to know exactly what you are getting for your money when hiring a mover.

 Tips on hiring a moving company: 

1. Get an in-house quote, then another, and another. A quote is no good if a company’s representative doesn’t come out and take an honest look at each room’s contents and then follow their visit up by putting their price, and what you are actually getting for your money, in writing.  And the first quote isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if you don’t have a second and a third to compare it to.  Get three quotes.
2. Ask friends, neighbors, and family who they have used in the past and had success with.  Get the actual name of the company rep they worked with.  A good referral goes a long way in easing stress during a move.
3. Dig into the quote.  Know if the movers will be assembling furniture like bed frames after delivery.  What’s the delivery window look like?  What about insurance?  You have to know what you’re getting for your money, and you sure don’t want to have any surprises on moving day, or when the bill from the moving company comes in the mail.

If you walk around the perimeter of your home inspecting the roof and spot physical damage or rotting, that’s your sign to call in a repairman and get your roof drainage issue resolved quickly.  Leaking and rotting soffits and fascia can become an expensive repair, and the sooner you address any issues you discover, the lower the final total on your repair bill. 

The problem is, this is one of those home repair issues you often don’t notice until it’s too late.  So I’m going to give you a quick task that can potentially save you a bundle.  And, watch this video to learn more on how to spot the warning signs of gutter, soffit and fascia leakage before it becomes too costly. 

The easiest way to spot a potential problem area along your roof line is to go outside and watch for leaks while it’s raining.  This is not very practical as first, it must be raining outside, and second, you’ll have to remember my little message here and do your inspection when it does.  So here’s the trick, go outside and inspect the perimeter of the roofline RIGHT NOW!  Go ahead, I’ll wait... 

…Oh, and, here’s what you’re looking for: Evidence of leaking.  I’m not talking about soffit and fascia that’s already pealing, cracked, decaying and falling apart, and I’m not talking about gutters that are falling away from the side of the house.  If you have those issues you already know to call a repairman.  I’m talking about finding a little problem before it becomes a BIG problem.  Look along your gutters, and the underlying fascia, trying to spot dark vertical streaks that are residue of dirty water from your roof overflowing the gutters, or working in behind the gutter and soaking the fascia.  I refer you to this website for the sole purpose of giving you a photograph example of what to look for.  This is not a foolproof method for spotting all problems.  There are many little things that can contribute to leaking.  This is, however, a very inexpensive (because it’s free) inspection you can perform yourself that can keep your repair bill in the hundred-dollar range and out of the thousands.  If you find these streaks, and your gutters are not obstructed with leaves, call your handyman and set up an appointment.  The problem might be as simple as installing a drip edge inside your gutters.

Everyone deserves a nice long vacation, and if you’re fortunate enough to be able to take the time off during the holidays then by all means pack up and go!  Yes, sometimes it’s nice just to stay home, watch a movie, complete the little renovation project on the powder room you started last spring, or maybe just catch up on some sleep – whatever suits you.  That’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about hitting the road, getting away, and in particular traveling during the holidays. 

Whether you’re venturing cross-country or just across the state, one thing to keep in mind when traveling during the holidays is the safety and security of your unoccupied home while you’re gone.  That brings up two main concerns, accidents and burglary. 

Accidents are the easiest to mitigate.  Start with turning off the main water supply valve in your home.  One of the top insurance claims throughout the year is water damage, and a burst pipe while no one is home to take care of it right away is no way to start the new year.  Also, turn off your water heater and its gas supply.  Not only does this prevent potential gas leaks, you’ll save money on your energy bill.  Everyone’s equipment is different, so refer to manufacturer’s directions first when considering any of these practices.  Here’s a complete checklist of things you can do to minimize the chances of an accident occurring while you’re away. 

The best way to deter burglary is to minimize opportunity while making it appear the house is operating just as it would any other day.  Stop newspaper delivery for the time you’re away so papers don’t start to pile up on the front porch.  Put house lights on timers.  Park a car in the driveway.  Remember, Business as usual.  That’s the message you want to broadcast to the outside world.  Even then, burglars are always out during the holidays looking for opportunities.  Don’t make it easy on them.  Hide spare car keys, jewelry, and other valuables in shoeboxes or behind the canned vegetables in the pantry.  Have a trusted neighbor stop by periodically to monitor the house, or consider hiring a house sitter for the week! 

Take a few extra steps for your peace of mind before your vacation and enjoy the holidays!