What home maintenance should I do each year?
A seasonal maintenance schedule for a typical home — what to check monthly, seasonally and annually, and why each one matters.
- Difficulty
- beginner
- Time
- 1 hr
- Read
- 2 min
Short answer
Monthly: test smoke alarms, run unused taps briefly. Seasonally: gutters in autumn and spring, heating check before winter, outside inspection after storms. Annually: boiler service, radiator bleed, stopcock exercise, loft and roof check, and a look at seals and sealant everywhere water sits.
Home maintenance is a series of very small jobs that prevent very large ones. The list below is ordered by consequence: the things at the top prevent injury or serious expense, and the things lower down prevent inconvenience.
Step by step
- Test smoke and carbon monoxide alarms monthly, and replace batteries annually.The single highest-value minute of maintenance in the house.
- Bleed radiators and get the boiler serviced once a year, before the heating season.Annual servicing is a condition of most boiler warranties, and September beats December for availability.
- Clear gutters and gullies in late autumn and again in spring.Blocked gutters are the leading cause of penetrating damp.
- Exercise the stopcock and any isolation valves twice a year.Valves seize if never turned. A seized stopcock is only discovered in an emergency.
- Check sealant around baths, showers and sinks annually.Failed sealant lets water into the structure long before you see a stain.
- Inspect the roof from the ground with binoculars after any storm.A single slipped tile is cheap to fix and expensive to ignore.
- Check the loft annually for insulation depth, daylight through the roof, and signs of damp or pests.Take a torch and look at the underside of the roof on a bright day — daylight means a gap.
- Descale kettles and shower heads and clean appliance filters quarterly in hard water areas.Scale shortens appliance life and reduces efficiency long before it causes failure.
- Clean the washing machine filter and run a hot maintenance wash quarterly.Prevents both smells and the drainage failure that eventually follows.
Tips
- Attach the annual jobs to the clock change so you don't have to remember dates — alarms, stopcock, gutters.
- Keep a single note of what was done and when. It's genuinely useful when selling, and it stops you doing things twice.
- Fix small things immediately. Almost every expensive household repair started as something small and visible.
- Photograph the loft, the meter positions and the stopcock once. You'll want them at some point.
Common mistakes
- Only doing maintenance when something breaks — Reactive repairs cost several times what prevention does, and always happen at the worst time.
- Skipping the boiler service to save money — It invalidates most warranties and misses the small faults that become failures.
- Ignoring small stains and drips — Water damage compounds — a slow leak behind a bath can rot a floor before it's visible.
Questions people ask
Is an annual boiler service really necessary?
It's a condition of most manufacturer warranties, it's a legal requirement for landlords with gas appliances, and it catches the faults that cause winter breakdowns. For a homeowner it's strongly advisable rather than mandatory.
What's the most-skipped job that matters most?
Testing smoke alarms, followed by clearing gutters. Both are quick, both are free or nearly so, and both prevent disproportionately serious outcomes.