New homeowner package

Your new homeowner checklist, done in one visit during the week you get the keys. Three exterior doors rekeyed, six smoke and carbon monoxide detectors installed, four ground fault outlets fitted where they belong, the dryer vent cleared and a caulk check through the whole house. The list every new owner writes on the drive home, handled by people who do it every week.

Closing on a house is followed immediately by the discovery that a dozen small things need doing and none of them are urgent enough to interrupt a weekend. Two years later most of them are still on the list. Booking one visit at the start clears the whole thing and, in the case of the keys and the detectors, removes two genuine risks in an afternoon.

What the visit covers

• Three exterior doors rekeyed, with new keys cut and the previous set retired
• Six combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, placed and tested
• Four ground fault outlets fitted at kitchen, bathroom, garage or exterior locations
• Dryer vent cleaned from the appliance through to the exterior hood
• A caulk check across every wet area, with failed joints cut out and renewed

All five are things a seller had no reason to do and an inspector had no reason to fail. They fall in the gap between the transaction and ordinary maintenance, which is exactly where things sit unattended for years.

Rekeying, and who still has a key

Consider who has held a key to the house you just bought. The sellers, their adult children, a neighbor, a dog walker, a cleaner, a contractor from six years ago, and whoever had the lockbox code during the listing. None of those people are a threat, and all of them are a reason the locks should not stay as they are.

Rekeying changes the pins inside the existing cylinder rather than replacing the hardware, so you keep matched finishes and spend a fraction of the cost. We key all three doors alike where the hardware allows it, which means one key for the house instead of the ring of unlabeled keys the sellers handed over.

Detectors that cover the whole house

Six units covers a typical three bedroom house, one in each sleeping room, one in the hall outside them, one on each level and one near the furnace. We read the manufacture date on anything already installed, because a detector that chirps on test can still have a sensor that expired years ago.

Carbon monoxide matters most where an attached garage sits below a bedroom, which is the room we most often find unprotected. Houses needing a full sweep, an extinguisher mounted properly and a written placement record move to the fire and carbon monoxide package instead.

Outlets, and where our line sits

Ground fault protection belongs at kitchen counters, both sides of a bathroom sink, the laundry, the garage, the unfinished basement and every exterior receptacle. Houses built before the requirement widened are usually missing several. Four devices handles the common gaps, and additional locations are a small line rather than another visit.

Replacing a receptacle in an existing box is device work our crews do. Adding a circuit, touching the panel, correcting an ungrounded two wire system or dealing with aluminum branch wiring is licensed electrical work and we bring in a licensed electrician rather than doing it ourselves. If we open a box and find aluminum or no ground, we stop and put the finding in writing.

That situation turns up regularly in houses built from the middle sixties into the middle seventies across this region. It is not an emergency and it does change what a safe upgrade looks like. What the code expects of an owner is covered in our plain language building code guide.

The caulk check nobody thinks to ask for

The joint where a tub meets tile moves every time somebody steps into it, and when it opens, water goes behind the surround and sits on the subfloor. Nothing appears for years. Then there is a soft spot in front of the tub, or a stain on a ceiling below, and the repair is framing rather than sealant.

We walk every wet area, cut out failed joints properly and lay new material rather than running a bead over the old, which is what makes most recaulking fail inside a year. Kitchens get the sink rim and the backsplash joint, which is where a slow leak hides under a cabinet until the base swells.

Where a joint is failing because tile or grout has failed, we say so. That is tile work rather than a sealant line, and doing it properly is cheaper than doing it twice.

What we tell you about the house

A crew spends most of a day walking a house you have owned for a week, and they see it with trade eyes. You get a written note at the end covering anything worth knowing, with no obligation attached. New owners tell us this is the most useful part, because it turns a vague sense of what might need doing into a short list with a rough order.

The usual entries are the age of the water heater, whether the sump discharge goes far enough from the foundation, where the main water shut off is, which doors are out of adjustment rather than worn, and whether the attic hatch has ever been sealed. None of that is alarming. All of it is better known than not.

We also show you the main shut off and how to close it before we leave. The person who can turn the water off in 30 seconds never has the flood story to tell, and it is astonishing how many owners have never located theirs.

Buying a house that needs work

Plenty of our clients buy knowing the kitchen is dated or the basement is unfinished, and they want to know what order to do things in. The general answer is that anything behind a wall comes before anything on the surface, and anything affecting water comes before everything. Paint is always last and always tempting to do first.

If a renovation is coming in year one, it is worth talking early even if the work is a year out, because sequencing decisions get expensive once they are made in the wrong order. How that works from our side is set out in our explanation of design and build, and the budget picture is in our renovation budget guide.

Buyers who negotiated a repair credit rather than repairs usually fold those items into this visit. Pricing them off the report is what the home inspection repairs package does, and combining the two means one mobilization in the week you move in.

The dryer vent, and why it is on this list

Nobody buys a house thinking about the dryer duct, and almost nobody knows when it was last cleaned. Lint is fuel, the duct runs warm, and the appliance at the end of it has a heating element. A long run from a basement laundry collects the worst of it, and flexible foil duct holds more than rigid pipe does.

We clear the full run and check that the exterior hood damper still swings, because a stuck damper vents warm damp air into the cavity behind it rather than outdoors. If the duct is crushed behind the appliance or terminates in an attic or crawl space, that is a correction and we will quote it rather than cleaning around the problem.

Laundry rooms being rebuilt anyway are the easy case, since the duct can be rerun properly while walls are open. That usually rides along with a basement laundry build at very little extra cost.

The paperwork nobody hands you

Sellers pass on a folder of appliance manuals and very little else. What you actually want is a record of the house, and the first year is when it is easiest to build. Photographs of the panel with the breakers labeled, the make and date of the furnace and water heater, where the shut offs are, and what has been done since you moved in.

We start that record with the written note from this visit, including the dates on every detector we install and where each one went. It sounds like administration until the day you sell the house, at which point it is the difference between answering a buyer’s question and guessing at it.

Owners who have had work done by several trades before they bought have a harder version of this, since nobody documented any of it. Our recommendation is to start from today rather than trying to reconstruct the past, and to keep permits and invoices in one place. What a permit covers and when one is needed is explained in our permit guide for Southeast Michigan.

Choosing who does the work after this

A new owner will hire several trades in the first two years, and the pattern that causes trouble is hiring on price alone for work that is hidden once it is finished. Anything behind drywall, under tile or in a wall cavity is worth the more careful choice, because the cost of doing it twice includes demolition.

We say that knowing it sounds self serving from a contractor, so here is the version that is not. Ask for the license number, ask who is actually on site, and ask what happens if something fails in year two. Our thinking on that is in how to choose a renovation contractor, and it applies whether or not you hire us.

Financing questions come up in the same conversation, since a first year of ownership rarely leaves much room for a project. The options available in this market are laid out in our financing notes, and they are worth reading before a plan hardens around a number.

Timing it against the season

Closing in September or October adds one more consideration. The house has to get through a Michigan winter, and the outdoor items have a deadline that closing dates do not respect. Hose bibbs, gutters and weatherstripping belong to fall winterization, which is worth booking in the same call.

If the house felt cold during showings, that is worth acting on before the first heating bill rather than after. Draft sealing and weatherization goes after the outlets, the window trim and the attic hatch, which is where the air actually leaves an older house here.

Older houses add one more item to the conversation. Federal rules require a certified firm to follow specific work practices when disturbing painted surfaces in homes built before 1978, which covers a large share of the housing stock in this region. It matters for sanding, cutting and demolition rather than for the work on this list, and it is scoped at estimate stage so nobody is surprised by it later.

We raise it here because new owners of older homes almost always start by wanting to sand something. Knowing the rule exists before you rent a sander is better than learning it halfway through a weekend, and it changes how a room should be prepared rather than whether the work can happen at all.

Where our new owners are buying

First houses cluster in Ypsilanti, Westland and Taylor, where the stock is older and the rekeying and detector items matter most. Move up buyers land in Saline, Dexter and Northville, usually into houses where the systems are newer and the questions are about what to change rather than what to fix.

Either way the visit looks the same and the scope adjusts to the house. We work across all six counties, and the full list of towns sits on our service area page.

What to have ready

• Every key the sellers handed over, including the ones nobody can identify
• How many copies of the new key you need cut
• Access to the laundry appliance and the electrical panel
• Any inspection report, which tells us where to look first
• A note of anything that has already bothered you in the first week

Most of these visits take a single day, and we would rather book one properly staffed day than split the list across two half days. Booking in the gap between closing and moving day is ideal, since an empty house is quicker to work in and nothing has to be moved twice. Where that gap does not exist, we work around furniture and boxes, which is normal and slows things only slightly.

Booking it

The work sits on the repairs and service side of the company, on its own calendar so a one day booking does not queue behind a larger project. Owners who want the house looked over on a schedule after this often move to the annual home check visit in the following year.

Everything carries the coverage in our workmanship warranty, and the hardware carries its own manufacturer terms. To see what our crews build when the job is bigger, View our Portfolio. Once you have a closing date, contact us now for a free quote, or book a consultation if the house needs more than this list.