Knowing how to take care of your home during winter, the most challenging time for homeowners is necessary if you want to save money while doing it! To help you do just this, let’s go over some affordable DIY winterizing ideas for your home.
Contents
Fight off the drafts
The first of the cheap and easy DIY winterizing ideas for your home we have to present is fixing your draft problem. You see, drafts are atrocious to suffer through during winter. They make it so much harder to keep your house warm and comfortable! This means that you will both feel much chillier than you’d like, and your bills will be higher. After all, energy efficiency is the name of the game, and drafts ruin any chance of achieving it.
Thankfully, the solution is not all that difficult in the slightest! All you need is some caulk and a caulking gun. Then, look closely at your window and door frames to see where the gaps allowing drafts to form are. Caulk will fill them in and eliminate them in a matter of minutes.
Do a heating system maintenance
No matter what sort of heating system you have for your home, it requires maintenance. A traditional fireplace needs to be cleaned out along with your chimney. An HVAC system needs to be cleaned and tuned up, and the filters inspected and changed as needed.
A central heating system often requires even more work, be it pipe maintenance or releasing pressure from the system, or one of the many other things required to keep it finely tuned. By performing the necessary work, you make the entire system more efficient, as well as safer to use. Allowing it to weather the period of cold much more easily and, hopefully, allowing it to do so without needing repairs.
Weatherstrip your doors and windows
Weather-stripping is, in essence, somewhat similar to caulking. It is done to eliminate any gaps between the movable bits of your windows and doors. The difference, and some would argue the advantage; it has over caulking, is that it is not supposed to be applied to the area between the frames and your walls. Instead, it goes between the different door or window parts.
In simple terms, weather strips are adhesive bits of thick ‘tape’ which fill in any gaps because they are squishy and allow your windows and doors to close despite getting ‘caught’ between the different parts. This is one of the easiest ways to fix any problems in your home caused by the warping of windows and doors due to age or neglect.
Put in the effort to insulate your attic
Doing proper attic insulation is not the easiest of the DIY winterizing ideas for your home on our list. However, it is also one of the ideas with the most significant potential payoff. If done correctly, attic insulation will make it much easier to keep your house warm and comfy during winter.
Just remember that, as the experts from Verified Movers like to point out, any more significant house renovation project necessitates moving a lot of stuff out. It will be best to empty your attic before attempting to insulate it—both for yourself and your belongings.
Look into water heater insulation
Now, ‘water heater insulation’ might sound daunting, and even like one of the DIY winterizing ideas for your home, that would be even harder to pull off than attic insulation. After all, anything that uses electricity and controls your hot water supply requires due caution, right?
As a homeowner, any problems with a water heater are on the list of issues to watch out for. However, just insulating it better is honestly relatively easy. You can purchase an insulating wrap cheaply, and it takes just a few minutes to wrap it around your water heater. Doing so will let your hot water maintain its temperature for longer and heat up faster!
Check the condition of your roof
If you are moving into a new home during winter and worry you don’t know how to do it properly, there are a few things you need to do first. Chief among them is checking the condition of your roof!
Now, it is true that you’d likely have at least a cursory home inspection done before buying. However, it is still easy to miss some minor damage, or you might have accepted it since it slightly lowers the price of a house. The main thing to look out for and DIY fix would be cracked, missing, or broken tiles. As long as you’re careful, it’s possible to do it safely, unlike most other work involving a roof.
The importance of cleaning your gutters
The other thing you need to do concerning your roof is to check the state of your gutters. Even if they look perfect, you want light cleaning for them. This will go a long way to ensuring they work properly even in the heaviest rainfall. Not to mention prevent moisture problems from developing in your attic or your home’s siding!
Eliminate any dangerous branches
The next and final thing on our list of DIY winterizing ideas for your home is eliminating dangerous branches if you have any trees or shrubbery in your yard or around your home. You see, strong winds have the nasty habit of whipping the branches of trees around.
Branches that can do a ton of damage to your roof, windows, or siding under the right or wrong conditions. You do not want to suddenly wake up one day to the sound of shattering glass. Or find tons of serious leaks in your roof just because you didn’t trim branches so they can’t reach your home!
Final comment
Being familiar with affordable DIY winterizing ideas for your home will let you both take care of your home and save some money! Just remember, if you run into a problem you’re not sure you can fix, it is better to call in professionals than take risks.
Meta Description: Check out our list of affordable DIY winterizing ideas for your home so you can better prepare your home for the most challenging season of the year!