Weekly Maintenance for your Home

October – Week 42

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.

Eavestroughs & Drains

This may or may not be the right week to tackle this project, it all depends on whether there are any leaves left to fall from the trees around your roof or not. There is not much point in cleaning it all out if there are a lot more leaves yet to fall. But you must clean out your rain gutters before the snow. If you don't, the combination of snow, ice and leafs will completely clog up your roof drainage system and it will not be functional during those critical thaw periods in late winter. When the snow run-off starts to come down your roof, you need to have the drains working, even under a snow blanket.

While you are cleaning out the troughs, check all the joints, especially those that attach the downspouts. If you need to seal leaking joints, check out "Rain Gutters" in the SEARCH tab above.

Flat top roofs need a visit after the leaves are down as well. Some flat top roofs have central drains that can be seriously clogged with leaves. Even just letting a pile of leaves collect in corners of a roof will promote decay and moss growth. It is also a good occasion to check out if you have any roof or flashing problems before it is too cold to do something about it.

Be careful about ladder safety. This is probably one of the most dangerous activities you could undertake around your house. For details on ladder safety, even information on a special self-levelling ladder base, check out "Ladders" in the SEARCH tab above.