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Be Prepared for the Changing Seasons

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And How This Can Affect Your Home Maintenance

Sometimes the changing seasons can be quick and serious. The weather here has been a bit of a roller coaster ride over the past several weeks. We’ve had temperatures ranging from below zero to seventy. Some of these swings have happened within days.

It’s currently seventeen degrees on midday Friday as I’m writing this. It’s predicted to be in the upper sixties by Monday. On the other side of this extreme, we had a low temperature of five degrees below zero this past Wednesday.

When the temperature gets down into single digits there is the concern of freezing water lines. This can lead to broken pipes and water damage. With proper preparation and planning these problems can be reduced.

This is where a home maintenance plan comes in.

Too often we get busy with life and forget to prepare for seasonal changes when it comes to our homes. We are creatures of habit. We perform our daily routines of coming and going and rarely bother to look around. Unless a doorknob falls off in our hand, or there’s no hot water for our shower, or the sink gets stopped up, or the AC doesn’t work, or any number of other problems occur, we just go through life without giving any thought to the maintenance of our homes.

Maintenance isn’t going to prevent every big problem from happening, but it decreases the likelihood. Having a scheduled maintenance plan will also help you find the needed repairs before they become major.

Having an intentional plan is important, but it won’t work if you don’t use it.

With everything else going on in life, how can we remember one more thing? We don’t have to if we have a scheduled plan. First, you need to decide if home maintenance is important enough for you to bother with. If you’re okay dealing with big problems, then don’t worry about maintenance. You’ll know that the pipes are frozen when you don’t have water at the faucet or there’s water spraying out of the broken pipe.

Because I live in an old family home that was built in 1916, there are still areas that have no insulation. It so happens that one of those areas is where the plumbing is. This means that part of my maintenance plan includes – stacking bales of hay along the north wall of the house and having a thermostat-controlled heat lamp in the crawlspace. The point of this is that if I don’t remember to take the precautions and the weather gets cold, I’ll more likely than not, have frozen pipes. That’s why this is part of my home maintenance plan.

Routine maintenance is a good way to minimize costly disruptions.

Seasons happen every year and are a natural part of life. Each season presents different weather conditions and temperatures which affect your home in varying ways. Combining a calendar and a seasonal Home Maintenance Checklist helps minimize bigger problems. This plan is broken down into monthly, quarterly, and annually by season.

Just like it’s cold right now—but expected to fifty degrees warmer in a few days—the seasons are the same way. It will be Spring before you know it and there are things that will need to be done.

Get your free Home Maintenance Plan and start taking care of your home maintenance today.

It’s Time for “Hot Chocolatey Mornings and Toasted Marshmallow Evenings”

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This is a Great Perspective for the Season of Autumn

Some people like the season of autumn…some not so much. Some people find the shortening of the days and the cooler weather depressing.

An example of this is the lady that noticed her husband becoming grumpy as the days got shorter and overcast. She noticed his mood was sulky and sullen and he was continuously pouting. It had been raining the last two days and she noticed him just standing there looking through the window.

She realized that if something didn’t change, she was going to have to do something. That’s when she determined that if it was still raining tomorrow, she would have to let him back inside.

We all have seasons that we like better than others. Some like the warm sunny days of summer. Others like the new beginning of the spring. Of course, there are those of us that like the slowing down that comes with the cold days of winter. And don’t forget the beautiful colors of the leaves in autumn.

Everything needs a season and there’s a season for everything.

Seasons are part of God’s plan as shown to us in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.

Christopher Robin gave Winnie the Pooh a calendar as a way to track the days, weeks, months and seasons. The calendar stopped at each season, which lead Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit and Owl to explore the world around them and noticing the changes. Among them: the water in the pond becomes hard and slick to skate on when it gets cold in the winter and becomes refreshing and fun to swim in when it gets warm in the summer.

As is typical of Winnie the Pooh, he found the positives rather than the negatives in the changing of the seasons. This is evident in his statement about autumn.

“It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!”

Every season of the year and life has good and bad things about them. It’s up to us to choose which we’re going to focus on in each season.

We would all be happier if we looked at the seasons and everything else in life more like Winnie the Pooh.

Everything is always moving and changing.

The changing of the seasons is a way to physically see the movement of time.

It’s up to you to decide what your seasonal focus will be on.