Snowbird home watch

A vacant home check every month while you are south, carried out by the same crews that build here rather than by somebody driving past to look at the mailbox. We walk the house, run the water, check the heat and the sump, walk the exterior and send you a written report with photographs the same day.

The reason this exists is simple arithmetic. Damage in an empty house is measured by how long it runs before anybody notices, and in a house nobody has entered since October that number is months. A pinhole leak that would be a towel on a Tuesday becomes a floor, a ceiling and a mold problem by March.

What each visit covers

• A full interior walk, room by room, including closets and the basement
• Every fixture run, so traps stay full and sewer gas stays out
• Heat, thermostat and any freeze alarm checked and recorded
• Sump pit filled and the pump cycled under real water, not just lifted by hand
• An exterior walk covering roofline, grade, doors, windows and the mail

The written report is the part clients value most. Each visit produces dated photographs and a short note on anything that changed since the last one, which means you are reading a record rather than taking somebody’s word for it from 1,200 miles away.

Why the fixtures get run every time

Every drain in a house has a trap holding a small amount of water, and that water is the only thing standing between the room and the sewer line. Left alone for eight weeks it evaporates, particularly in a house being heated dry all winter. The result is a smell people describe as the house going stale, and the fix is 30 seconds per fixture on a schedule.

Floor drains and basement laundry standpipes are the ones that go first because nobody uses them anyway. Guest bathrooms come next. We run them all, including the ones you would forget, and we note anything that drains slowly, since a slow drain in November is a blocked one by February.

Heat, and the number that actually matters

Setting a thermostat to 55 is common advice and it is fine for the middle of a house. The pipes that freeze are rarely in the middle of a house. They run through exterior walls, under a kitchen sink on an outside corner, or through an unheated crawl, and those spaces sit well below whatever the hallway thermostat reads during a cold snap.

We check the thermostat, confirm the furnace is actually cycling rather than displaying a setting, and look at the rooms most likely to be cold. Where a house has a history of a particular pipe freezing, that spot goes on the checklist permanently and gets looked at first on every visit.

What we find, in rough order of frequency

Ice dams at the eave, which show up inside as a stain at the top of a wall. A sump pump that has stopped working since the last visit. Mice, which arrive in November and are far easier to deal with in week one than in month three. A door or window that has been left unlocked by whoever was last in the house. And condensation on windows, which tells us the humidity is climbing for a reason worth finding.

Ice dams are the Michigan specialty and they are a symptom rather than a defect in the gutter. Warm air leaking into the attic melts snow from below, the water runs to a cold eave and freezes, and the dam pushes water back under the shingles. The lasting fix is air sealing and insulation, which is what draft sealing and weatherization is for, done before you leave rather than after the ceiling stains.

Sump failures are the other repeat. A pump that ran fine in September can seize over winter, and the pit is full exactly when the spring melt arrives. We cycle it under water on every visit, which is the only test that means anything, and we check where the discharge line actually ends. Winter basement behavior is covered further in our notes on Michigan basements in winter.

Before you leave, and what should be done first

A watch service is not a substitute for closing the house down properly. The single highest value thing you can do is make sure the main water shut off works and use it, because a closed main turns almost every plumbing failure into a non event. Checking and replacing valves is part of the water damage prevention package.

Outdoors, the hose bibbs want draining, the gutters want clearing and the dryer vent hood wants checking, all of which sit in fall winterization. Clients who are leaving for the season typically book that in October and the watch visits behind it, which means the house is closed properly and then monitored rather than one or the other.

Freeze alarms and water sensors are worth the small cost in any house that sits empty. They do not replace a visit, since a sensor tells you about water that has already arrived, but the combination of a sensor and somebody who can be at the house within the hour is a genuinely different risk profile from either one alone.

Who this is for

Retired couples wintering in Florida or Arizona are the obvious group, and they are the majority of these bookings. Beyond them, we run this for families whose parents have moved into care while the house sits pending a decision, for owners of second properties on the lakes in Livingston County, and for estates waiting on probate where nobody local is available.

Houses standing empty between a sale and a closing count too, particularly when the sale has stretched into winter. Buyers get nervous about an empty house in February, and a documented monthly record is a reasonable thing to be able to hand over.

We cover all six counties, so a house in Chelsea, a condo in Royal Oak and a lake place near Pinckney can all sit on the same schedule. The full list is on our service area page.

Mice, and the winter they move in

An empty house in a Michigan November is warm, quiet and undefended, which is the exact specification a mouse is looking for. They come in where the dryer vent penetrates the rim joist, where a gas line enters, under a garage service door with a worn sweep, and through gaps in a stone foundation that have been there since the house was built.

Catching it in week two costs almost nothing. Catching it in month three means droppings through cabinets, insulation pulled apart in the attic and a smell that takes a spring to shift. Every visit includes a look at the usual entry points and the usual evidence, and sealing penetrations is ordinary carpentry we can handle on the spot.

Attics are where the damage gets expensive, since insulation that has been nested in stops performing and has to be replaced rather than fluffed back up. The background on what should be up there is in our attic insulation guide, and it is worth reading before you leave rather than after.

The exterior walk

Half of what threatens an empty house never gets inside it. We walk the full perimeter on every visit, looking at the roofline for lifted shingles and ice build up, at the grade for settlement against the foundation, and at the downspouts for the discharge that has been knocked loose by a plow or a drift.

Siding and trim get the same look, since a joint that opens in a freeze takes on water in the next thaw and the cycle repeats 30 times before spring. Where we see something progressing, it gets photographed each month so you can watch it rather than discover it. Repairs there are siding and exterior work, quoted before anything happens.

Decks carry snow load all winter and show their weaknesses in March. A rail that has loosened, a board that has cupped and a post base that is sitting in wet ground are all worth knowing about before the first warm weekend. Seasonal deck care is covered in our deck maintenance guide, and the structural side sits with our deck crews.

Garages get walked too. An overhead door with a failed seal lets snow drift in, and a service door left unlocked is the most common security finding we report. Where the garage holds a vehicle or a boat for the season, that changes the checklist and we adjust it.

Coming home in April

The last visit before your return is the useful one. We open the water back up, check every fixture for leaks under pressure, confirm the heat and the appliances are running and get the house ready to be lived in rather than leaving you to find problems on the first night back with your luggage in the hall.

Opening a water system is where dormant failures announce themselves, which is exactly why it should happen with somebody standing there. A supply line that let go quietly at some point over winter does nothing at all until pressure returns, and then it does everything at once.

Clients often use that visit to schedule the spring work, since the crew has been walking the house for five months and knows what needs doing. Detectors are the common one, because batteries die in an empty house and nobody hears them, which is handled under the fire and carbon monoxide package.

Owners across Washtenaw County tend to book the return visit for the week before they fly, and it is worth setting that date when you set the rest. Spring calendars fill quickly once the weather turns, and the work found over winter is usually small enough that it can be done before you are back in the house.

What we are, and what we are not

Stated plainly, because it matters for what you are buying. This is a maintenance and condition check carried out by a licensed builder. It is not a security service, we are not a monitoring company, and we do not represent these visits as satisfying any requirement your insurer may impose on a vacant property.

Most policies treat a house as vacant after a set period and many carry conditions about heat, water and inspection frequency. Read yours, or ask your agent, before you leave. If your insurer asks for documented periodic checks, our written reports give you exactly that, but the requirement is theirs to define and not ours to interpret.

What we will do beyond looking is fix what we are able to fix. A crew that is already standing in the house can reset a tripped breaker, restart a pump or tarp something temporarily, and larger work gets photographed, quoted and approved by you before anybody touches it. Nothing gets done on assumption.

One question comes up in almost every first conversation, so here is the answer. People ask whether a neighbor doing the same thing would be enough. A neighbor is genuinely valuable and worth having regardless, since somebody close by who notices a broken window is worth more than any schedule. What a neighbor will not usually do is cycle a sump pump under water, read a furnace that is displaying rather than running, or recognize that a hairline stain at a ceiling edge is an ice dam rather than a spill. None of that is a criticism of neighbors.

Those are trade judgments, and the point of this service is having somebody make them every month and write down what they saw. It also removes the awkwardness of asking a favor repeatedly across an entire winter, which is the reason most people stop asking after the second month.

The report you receive

Each visit produces a dated record with photographs of the mechanical room, the sump, any area of concern and the exterior elevations. Comparing month to month is where the value sits, because a stain that is 2 inches wider than it was in December is telling you something a single photograph never could.

Clients who want the same discipline applied while they are living in the house year round usually move to the annual home check visit, which is the occupied version of the same thinking, once a year with a written condition report at the end.

What to arrange before the first visit

• Keys and any alarm code, held under our own access procedure
• Written authority to enter, including anything your association requires
• Contact details for you and one local person, for anything urgent
• A note of known problem spots, including any pipe that has frozen before
• Confirmation of what you want us to act on without asking first

That last item saves time when something goes wrong in January. Clients usually set a small threshold we can act within to stop damage, with anything above it coming to them first. Agreeing it in October is better than deciding it over a bad phone line at 8 p.m.

Booking the season

Most clients book the run of months before they travel, which lets us schedule the visits and hold the slots. The work runs through the repairs and service side of the company, and any repair that grows past a visit follows our normal project process with the same crews.

Repairs carried out during a visit carry the coverage in our workmanship warranty. To see what those crews build the rest of the year, View our Portfolio. To set up the season before you go, contact us now for a free quote, or book a consultation and we will walk the house with you first.