Seasonal Tips

How to Winterize Your House: The Before-the-First-Freeze Checklist

Mea Cara · October 22, 2026 · 6 min read

Winterizing a house sounds like a weekend of crawling around with a caulk gun. It is mostly not. The jobs that matter are the ones that stop water from freezing where it should not be, keep the heat you pay for inside, and make sure the furnace does not quit on the first cold night. Most of them take ten minutes, and the deadline for all of them is the first hard freeze, which across much of the United States and Canada lands somewhere between now and mid-November.

Here is the list, ordered by what it costs you if you skip it. Do the top of each section first and the rest as you get to it.

1. Outdoor water, before the first hard freeze

A burst pipe is the most expensive thing on this page and the easiest to prevent. Water expands when it freezes, and an outdoor faucet with a hose still attached cannot drain, so the ice forms inside the wall where you cannot see it.

• Disconnect every hose. Drain it, coil it, and bring it in. This one step prevents most frozen hose bibs.
• Shut off and drain exterior faucets if they have an interior shutoff valve. Close the valve inside, then open the outside tap to let it empty. If you do not know whether you have one, follow the pipe from the faucet back into the basement or crawl space.
• Blow out or drain the irrigation system. Sprinkler lines sit shallow and freeze first. An irrigation company will blow the lines out with compressed air for a modest fee; a drained system left with water in the backflow preventer is a spring repair bill.
• Foam faucet covers are cheap insurance on faucets without a shutoff. They are not a substitute for disconnecting the hose.

If you have a pool, a pond pump, or an outdoor kitchen, each has its own shutdown, and the manual is where to find it.

2. The furnace, before you need it

• Change the filter now and write the size down somewhere you will find it. A clogged filter makes the furnace work harder, run longer, and fail sooner. Through the heating season, check it monthly.
• Book a tune-up if the system has not been serviced in a year. The technician checks the heat exchanger, burners, ignition, and safety controls. Call in October and you get a convenient appointment; call during the first cold snap and you wait behind everyone whose furnace just died.
• Run it once on a mild day. A slight burning-dust smell for a few minutes is normal. Anything that smells like gas, or a furnace that short-cycles on and off, is a call to a technician before the weather turns.
• Test the thermostat and replace its batteries if it takes them. If you have a programmable one, set the winter schedule now.

3. Gutters and the roof

Gutters clogged with leaves hold water, and held water freezes into a dam that pushes meltwater back up under the shingles. Clean them after the trees finish dropping, which is usually mid-November, and make sure the downspouts carry water at least a few feet from the foundation. While you are looking up, look for lifted or missing shingles and flashing that has pulled away from the chimney. From the attic on a bright day, look for daylight where there should not be any.

4. Stop the drafts you are paying for

Air leaks cost more than thin insulation does. The easiest way to find them is to walk the house on a windy day with the back of your hand near window frames, door edges, and where pipes and wires come through exterior walls.

• Weatherstripping on exterior doors and a door sweep at the bottom. A door sweep costs less than a lunch and pays for itself in a season.
• Caulk gaps around window trim outside and spray foam around pipe penetrations.
• Shrink-film window kits on single-pane or leaky windows in rooms you heat.
• Close the fireplace damper when the fireplace is not in use. An open damper is a hole in the roof the size of a dinner plate.
• Reverse the ceiling fans to run clockwise on low, which pushes the warm air at the ceiling back down.

5. The safety checks

Heating season is fire season. Furnaces, fireplaces, and space heaters all come back into use at once.

• Test smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and replace batteries. Replace any alarm over ten years old; the manufacture date is printed on the back.
• Have the chimney inspected if you burn wood, before the first fire. Creosote buildup is what chimney fires are made of.
• Check the dryer vent for lint while you are thinking about it. It takes five minutes and it is one of the most common causes of house fires.
• Clear a path to the shutoffs. Know where the main water shutoff and the gas shutoff are, and make sure nothing is stacked in front of them. If a pipe does burst, the first minute is spent finding that valve.

6. The small things that are easy to forget

• Flush the water heater if it has not been done in a year; sediment steals efficiency and shortens its life.
• Test the sump pump by pouring a bucket of water into the pit and confirming it runs and shuts off.
• Put the snow shovel and ice melt where you can reach them before the first storm, not after.
• Trim branches that overhang the roof or lean on power lines; snow load is what brings them down.
• Store patio furniture, grills, and anything with a cushion. Cover the air conditioner's outdoor unit with a board on top, not a wrap, which traps moisture.

What to write down

The furnace filter size, so the next one is a single trip to the hardware store. The date the furnace was serviced and what the technician said. Where the interior faucet shutoffs are, because you will forget by next October. Whether the irrigation was blown out, and by whom. And the age of each alarm, so the ten-year replacement is a date on a calendar rather than a surprise.

Every one of those is a line in a home binder. HavenBinder puts them on a seasonal checklist that only mentions the equipment your house actually has, warns you when a freeze is in the forecast and the hoses are still on, and keeps the filter size one tap away. It is free to start. If you want the full year rather than just this season, the complete seasonal maintenance schedule is the longer list, and what maintenance actually costs explains why the cheap jobs on this page are worth doing on time.

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