Looking after your home takes a lot of effort! You have to clean up on a daily basis, keep an eye on your property’s stability on a monthly one, and ensure that the weather outside never gets too frightful for your home to stand up against. All in all, you’ve got a long to-do list to follow all year round, and maintaining your living standard doesn’t tend to come easy!

However, a lot of people can forget about the seasonal-only jobs that make living in your home much more convenient. You don’t have to complete the same list of chores throughout the spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and you can save yourself a bit of time and energy by crossing some items off the list until next year!

But what are these seasonal jobs you can afford to wait around for? Well, we’ve got a list of the most crucial below. Starting with the spring, and ending with the winter, make sure you keep them in mind when it comes to keeping up with your maintenance needs all year round.

Check for Air Leaks

Spring is a time for cleaning and starting anew, so set the season up right by checking for air leaks around your home. Go around the windows and doors in all rooms and check for cracks and pulls in the seals - you may want to take a magnifying glass as you do! If you find any gaps, you’ll want to seal them back up again with a caulking gun, to prevent air from seeping out and upping your electricity bill.

You don’t have to stop at just the leaks either! No matter what kind of crack you come across, be sure to get your caulking gun out and seal it up. This is especially important if you’ve noticed some of your tile grouting or the tiles themselves coming apart - sealing as soon as possible prevents water from seeping into the walls and causing weakness with your property’s frame. You can then replace the tiles later on if need be.

Clear Out Your Drains

Another common springtime task is to clear out the drains/plug holes in your home. They’ve seen a lot of use over the past year, and you’ll want to unscrew them and get in there with a brush to remove all the potential hair, dust, and water sediment that may have collected.

Yes, this can be a particularly nasty job, so get it out of the way in the spring - you may want to purchase some gloves as well! In the future, it might be worth it to install a ‘hair catcher’ in your bath or shower, to prevent you from having to do this type of job again. But if you’d really rather not get your hands in there at all, you can pop some bleach or a homemade baking soda/vinegar remedy down the plugholes, leave for about 5 minutes, and then rinse with plenty of water.

Remember, if you’re using bleach to clean your bathroom or kitchen, don’t mix it with any other chemicals, whether they're natural or not.

Flush Your Water System

The final spring job on this list, close out the season by flushing your water system and ensuring there’s no build up left in either the pipes or the tank. If you live in an area that has a high prevalence of hard water, or your soft water damper hasn’t been working well recently, this job definitely needs to go on your list.

Start by ensuring your hot water is turned on, and then run all the water fixtures in your home at once. Do this for at least 10 minutes, with any faucets or shower pumps turned in the hot direction, and then switch your water off at the source. It’s also a good idea to do the same actions with your cold water, just for a shorter period of time - about 3 to 5 minutes will flush this part of your tank just fine!

Check on Your Furnace

Wrapping round to the summer time now, you’ve got the chance to get down to your basement or under-stair cupboard and check out how your furnace is operating. You won’t be needing to turn it on for the season ahead, so it’s safe to do a quick inspection right now! But what should you be looking for? Take it step by step:

Start with the filter; if it’s dirty and/or hasn’t been replaced in quite a while now, be sure to swap it out for a new one. Similarly, make sure there are no blockages around your furnace that could be preventing the hot air from leaving. And finally, start it up and see how it kicks into action. You might need to call out a Furnace Repair and Maintenance service if it takes longer than usual to get going, or seems to be a lot hotter to the touch than usual.

Change All Your Filters

Image Via The Original Charleston Bedswing

Another summertime job for you here! Before the sun comes out properly and brings all the warm and potentially humid weather with it, get round your house with a bunch of spare filters in hand. Start with your air conditioning unit here; it’s probably collected a lot of dust since you last used it, and you certainly won’t want all that grim clogging up your air flow! It’ll cost more to run, and simply won’t cool your house down in the way you expect it to.

You can also replace filters on your fans, both in the bathroom and in the kitchen. These will get very dirty very quickly, thanks to the heavy use, and they’ll need some support for the upcoming season!

Wash Your Curtains

Now we’re moving into the autumnal season, where it’s getting cold and damp outside and your home is likely to allow some of that to seep in. However, we can stop this in its tracks with even a simple job like taking your curtains down and washing them. This is a good job for the autumn as it helps you to keep the curtains clean for the dirty season ahead, and it also ensures that the beginnings of a potential mold growth is stopped in its tracks.

And your curtains are much easier to wash than you may think! If they’re hand wash only, you just need to get a bowl of lukewarm water, gentle soap, and a scrubbing brush. However, if they’re fine to machine clean, you can shove them in the washer on a gentle cycle and then hang them out to dry when they’re done. Make sure they’re able to ‘drop’ naturally as you do so, to prevent them from drying out of shape.

Cut Back Your Plants

This one is a late autumn, early winter job, depending on what you’re growing in your garden and/or how much time you’ve got to focus on it. And seeing as most plants tend to recede a little during this part of the season anyway, it’s a good idea to help them on their way and cut back as much of their foliage as possible.

Not only will this prevent you from having such a big mulch cleanup job in the springtime, but it will also help the plant to grow back bigger and stronger next year as well. The more vigorously you tend to cut something back, the more vigorously it grows back in turn, and you’ll save yourself some money in not having to buy new seed packets. Not only that, but a bigger, healthier plant attracts more bugs and bees, which is always a good sign for a growing garden!

Add Polish to Surfaces

And now that we’re well into winter, it’s time to do a protective job of the surfaces in your home, especially if you’ve got a lot of wooden furnishings! The winter can make them very brittle and cause them to break, especially if you live somewhere that regularly experiences sub-zero temperatures. So, take some caution here in the early winter days and apply some furniture friendly polish and/or wax to your comfy sofa and coffee table.

Be sure to use ‘thick’ types of polish in this instance; the more viscous consistency will do a much better (and longer!) job of sealing the wood finish and preventing the cold from damaging it. And make sure to add a bit of extra polish to those seats and tables you use most often; the wear and tear of daily use can remove the polish much faster and reverse your hard work!

How much do you dread your home maintenance to-do list? Well, we’re hopeful you won’t have to put your cleaning and repair jobs off for much longer! After all, you just have to keep up with a few jobs at a time from now on, and that’s much easier than having to spend a whole weekend up a ladder clearing out your guttering!