With Christmas around the corner, it’s time to prep your home for the holidays. You may have family, friends and other visitors coming soon, and you’ll want to make sure everything is in top condition for all the celebration. Here are some quick projects to get your home ready.
Day 1: Put up holiday lights.
The first step in any getting any home festive for the holiday season is stringing bright lights along the roof, siding, trees and anywhere else that makes sense — carefully. If you’re uncertain or feel particularly shaky about putting up the lights yourself, you can hire a service to install your holiday lighting for around $550, depending on how many lights you need strung up. That way, you can stay indoors and do other prep work — and you’ll still have a beautifully lit house.
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Day 2: Clean the fireplace.
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When it’s especially chilly at night, it’s nice to gather everyone around a relaxing fire to get warm, chat and enjoy some egg nog. However, you need to check and clean the fireplace and chimney ahead of time to avoid any hazards. If you haven’t used the fireplace in a while, there could be a lot of ash buildup, which could cause a fire in the walls of your chimney. You should also check out the chimney for any leaks or cracks and have it repaired if needed. You don’t want smoke coming into your living room because there’s something wrong with the chimney.
Day 3: Weatherstrip your doors and windows.
Your home should be cozy and comforting when you host parties and have intimate family dinners ahead of the holidays. If someone is sitting near a window that is improperly insulated, they could get a chill and ask you to turn up the heat to compensate. You could also hear the heater turn on more often to deal with leaks and drafts. You should go around and inspect your windows and doors for any leaks by putting your hand against them and feeling for cold air. Weatherstrip any leaks to fix them.
Day 4: Check your plumbing.
Nobody wants to deal with an emergency like a pipe burst or an over-running toilet over the holidays, but with freezing winter temperatures and guests making frequent visits to your seldom-used powder room, there’s a certain potential for it. You can hire a local plumber to come by and check your pipes for any signs of leaks, rust or other upcoming issues. You can also wrap your pipes with insulation material to avoid them freezing when it gets particularly cold.
Day 5: Inspect your furnace filter and clean if needed.
Did you know that you should check and clean your furnace filter once a month? It’s so the hot air more easily flows through your ducts and vents into the rooms of your home. When you don’t clean your filter, the furnace has to work harder to push hot air, which increases the strain on the furnace and your utility bill by extension. It’s easy to pull out the furnace filter, clean it with some chemicals and put it back in. It will eventually need replacement, but that’s less expensive than replacing your furnace in winter.
Day 6: Look at your insulation.
Over time, insulation wears down in your attic with repeated damage from moisture, pests and other natural conditions. As a result, it can develop holes that allow cold air to come through the roof and through the ceiling into your home. This kicks your heater on to compensate for the cold air and increases your utility bill. Go upstairs to your attic and check your insulation levels for such holes. If there are glaring issues, you will need to call a home insulation contractor to lay more insulation down and cut off the cold air.
Day 7: Have your home audited.
Once you take care of all the easy-to-find problems, consider having your home audited to find the bigger, harder-to-find issues. A home inspector has the knowledge, experience and certification to do a thorough, room-by-room analysis of your home — and an inspection will uncover any issues you might not have known about. The inspection could take anywhere from a few hours to half a day, so be prepared to wait and see how extensive the issues might be.
Day 8: Take care of what the audit finds.
Home inspections can reveal a wide variety of issues — roof leaks, electrical wiring issues, HVAC defects, gutter and downspout drainage issues, structural damage, environmental issues, and so on and so forth. Once you receive a report from the home inspector— which may be longer than you’d expected — it’s time to determine which projects need to be immediately addressed.
If you see these projects on the inspector’s list, handle them as soon as possible:
- Mold
- Wiring or electrical problems
- Roof leaks
- Pests
- Improper drainage
Other problems — inadequate ducts and vents, room for environmental improvement and minor cracks in the foundation — are issues that can probably wait until spring. But all of these issues will require professional assistance and immediate work as well.
Day 9: Install a new thermostat.
One quick, energy-efficient project you can perform in your home is replacing your old thermostat with a better, programmable one. Recent innovations in the thermostat industry have allotted for models with smart technology. There are types that can predict your patterns and modify the temperature based on when you’re in and out of the home, along with others that can be controlled by your mobile phone. Installing them is relatively simple, depending on the existing wiring in your wall. You might need professional assistance if the old wiring is particularly difficult, but otherwise it’s quick and efficient — and it will decrease your utility bill. With a programmable thermostat, your house stays warm when you’re entertaining guests, but you don’t have to worry about stepping out and turning off the thermostat beforehand.
Day 10: Revitalize your walls.
If you have lived in your home for many years, the walls have likely seen a lot of action — whether from hands, paws, furniture or other things running into them. Set a day aside to patch them up a little bit so they look renewed. If you really have the time, you could even repaint one as an accent wall to draw visitors’ attention in the living room where the Christmas tree is situated. Just make sure the tree doesn’t accidentally fall against it!
Day 11: Clean!
Once all of this heavy home renovation work is out of the way, it’s time to clean everything up. Go through every room in your home and get it spotless. Vacuum, dust, scrub — do whatever it takes to remove every inch of dust, grime and finger or pawprint from the room in preparation for guests. If you need additional assistance with a particularly large home, you can call in a professional cleaning service to assist you.
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Day 12: Get everything organized.
All of these projects and renovations — if not all of the Christmas preparation — have likely made your home look like a whirlwind went through it. Now is a good time to go through and organize everything. Put away all of the tools you used to spruce up your home and do some final quick cleaning. Then your home should be prepared for entertaining and the many holiday celebrations ahead.
Photos courtesy of DesignMine
About Andrea Davis
Andrea Davis works for HomeAdvisor, which helps homeowners find the right home improvement professionals and now makes the process simple from start to finish for everyone using Mhelpdesk. Homeowners can use HomeAdvisor Reviews to see what past customers have to say about each professional, and can calculate average local and national costs for a variety of home projects using Cost Guides. Access to all information and features is free for homeowners.
Note: This is a guest post; the views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or position of Redfin.
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