If you’re anything like me, you won’t worry about a property maintenance task until it becomes a problem. The trouble is that winter tends to bring those issues to the forefront. As wet, windy and freezing weather batter our homes, problems with the windows, roof, gutters and drains become more noticeable.
You might discover that your heating system isn’t keeping you warm when the temperature drops or that a cracked tile is letting the rain into your roof. Both of which are essential to get fixed straight away and you’ll find yourself calling out a boiler engineer on a snowy morning or trying to get a free roof replacement quote on a grey day after a storm has damaged your ridge.
Here are just a few of the issues that the winter has caused at my home:
- The wooden porch door has swollen in the wet weather and is difficult to close or open.
- Likewise, the wooden garden gate no longer fits in the space between the fence posts, so it’s half-open at all times.
- The outdoor tap froze, bringing ice into the interior pipework and causing a leak.
- The mortar on the ridge of the roof has crumbled away in one place.
- There’s a mysterious damp patch appearing in the corner of an upstairs room, indicating that moisture must be getting in.
- Cold and condensation have made the cardboard boxes in my attic go soggy, so I’ve taken everything out of the loft.
And that’s just the start of it!
As I sit in my home office today and type this article, there are clunks and scrapes and swooshes going on all around me. That’s because the exterior of my home is getting a makeover. Not something aesthetic, but something essential for the longevity of the structure.
Firstly, the gutters are being cleared out. While this might seem like such a small task, if you let it build up, it can become a huge maintenance issue. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. Oops.
About five years ago – maybe longer – we had the gutters cleared out by our window cleaners. I’m sure they did a great job, but since then, the gutters have been filling up with debris and, because our roof is SO high up, I’ve never really checked them.
I’d say it’s near impossible for me to check my gutters. I would need to climb up scaffolding to reach them. Even checking them visually from the ground is difficult, as I can’t get far enough back from the front of my house to see the roof. I’d need to be in the neighbour’s living room to see it.
However, I can certainly see that my gutters need cleaning out when plants are growing out of them!
That would explain why the water is pouring out of the gutter halfway along it, rather than flowing through the downpipe to the drain. And that means water is sitting around the footings of our property, making the area damp, and now there’s algae growing on the bricks and slippery moss on the path.
I think we’ve left it a bit too long between gutter clear-outs! But there’s no way I can get up to the gutter to clean it myself, so at least it’s being done now. Likewise, I can never reach the soffits and fascias, but they are now speckled with green algae or lichen, so those are being scrubbed clean as part of the gutter clear-out, too.
I know what a tricky job it is to clean the soffits and fascias because I previously revamped my old discoloured PVC window frames to bring them back to white, and that was a lot of effort – but worth it in the end. It certainly breathed new life into the windows and helped them to last longer.
The drainpipes will be checked and finally, all the windows and doors will be cleaned, bringing the whole exterior of the house back to sparkling new condition. Now, what’s next on the list?
I hope that by sharing my winter property woes, it might help you to keep your own home cosy and dry. What home maintenance tasks will you be finally tackling this winter? Have you noticed anything that you want to get sorted to keep your property in a state of good repair? Let me know in the comments below. 🙂
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