Weekly Maintenance for your Home

December – Week 50

Just like preventative maintenance on your car, if you take care of a few small items around the house every week, you can avoid many emergency breakdowns and expensive repairs.

Holiday visitors and slippery walkways show up at the same time of the year so you need to do some ICE PLANNING. We can't totally eliminate the formation of ice around our houses, but we can deal with it to make it as safe as possible for our guests.

One of the worst kinds of dangerous ice is the slippery driveway or walkway created by roof downspouts. When they discharge across concrete and asphalt, that helps to get the water away from the house most of the year, but in the winter, this can create an ice rink. However inconvenient it may be, in the transition season between rain and snow, you must extend the downspouts to the other side of walking paths. If you have a sump pump that discharges onto the ground, it too must flow away from those walking paths.

Keep your eye on ice cycles that could be overhead of those walking paths as well. There is a lot of information in the SEARCH tab above to help you deal with "Roof - Ice", but for Christmas safety, just make sure that you knock down any ice cycles before they get big enough to become dangerous.

You should keep a good stock of de-icers around as well. Remember that not all de-icers do the same job. Some are designed to cut through the ice to help eliminate the ice itself, others create a non-slip surface on top of the ice. You usually need both. For more details on de-icers check the SEARCH tab above for "Ice - Safety".