Fall winterization

Time to winterize house and garage before the first hard freeze does it for you. Two hose bibbs drained and shut, weatherstripping on four doors, gutters cleared, the dryer vent cleaned out and four smoke detectors replaced. One crew, one visit, usually half a day. In Washtenaw County the first hard frost tends to land in the middle of October, which means the window for this work is open right now and closes fast.

Every item on this list is cheap in September and expensive in January. A hose bibb that freezes splits inside the wall, and you find out in April when the water comes through the ceiling below it. A gutter packed with maple leaves sends melt water down the foundation instead of away from it. None of this is dramatic work. It is the work that keeps the dramatic work from happening.

What the visit covers

The package is fixed, so you know the scope before anyone arrives. It is built around the five failures our crews see most often in Michigan houses between November and March, and it is sized to a standard single family home. Bigger houses and outbuildings get quoted on top rather than squeezed in.

• Two exterior hose bibbs shut off at the interior valve, drained and left open
• Weatherstripping replaced on four exterior doors, including the door to the garage
• Gutters and downspouts cleared, with the discharge checked at grade
• Dryer vent cleaned from the appliance to the exterior hood
• Four smoke detectors replaced, with fresh batteries in the rest

Why the hose bibb goes first

Most houses here have a frost free sill cock, which people assume cannot freeze. It can, and it does, when a garden hose is left attached. The hose holds water against the valve seat, the valve seat sits inside the wall, and the split happens where nobody can see it. Our crew pulls the hose, closes the interior shut off, opens the exterior valve and leaves it open so the line drains itself.

What gets found in the gutters

Silver maple seeds in spring, oak leaves in fall, shingle grit all year. The grit is the interesting one, because a gutter full of granules usually means the roof surface above it is giving up. We do not sell roofs, so when we see that we simply tell you what we saw and let you decide. The same goes for a fascia board that has gone soft under a leaking joint, which is exterior carpentry work rather than a cleaning line item.

Weatherstripping is the line people underestimate

Stand at your back door on a cold morning and put the back of your hand along the strike side. If you feel the outside, that gap has been leaking heat for every hour of every winter you have lived there. Compression weatherstripping flattens and hardens over about five years, and the sweep at the bottom wears through faster than that because a shoe hits it several times a day.

Four doors covers the typical house. The garage passage door matters more than people expect, since an attached garage is the coldest space touching your living area and often the least sealed. If your doors are past sealing, meaning the slab has warped or the jamb has rotted at the bottom, that becomes exterior door replacement and we will quote it separately rather than pretend a strip of foam fixes it.

The dryer vent nobody has looked at since the house was built

Lint in a dryer duct is a fire load sitting in a warm metal tube. It is also the reason your towels take two cycles. The run from a basement laundry up and out through the rim joist collects the worst of it, and flexible foil duct traps more than rigid pipe does. The crew clears the full run and checks that the exterior hood damper still swings, because a stuck damper vents your dryer into the cavity behind it.

If the run is crushed behind the appliance or vents into the attic, we will say so. That correction usually belongs with the rest of basement climate and air handling work, and it is worth doing before you add insulation anywhere near it.

Detectors, and the dates on the back of them

Smoke detectors expire. There is a manufacture date printed on the back of every unit and the sensing element is done at around ten years whether the test button chirps or not. Four units covers most houses for the sleeping areas and the main hall. The crew reads the dates on the rest and swaps batteries while they are up the ladder, which saves you the winter evening where one of them starts chirping at 2 a.m.

Carbon monoxide is the other half of that conversation and it gets sharper in October, because the furnace comes on and the house gets sealed up at the same time. Detector placement, extinguisher mounting and outlet protection sit in our fire and carbon monoxide package if you want the full sweep rather than the four units this one includes.

What a Michigan winter actually does to a house

Our freeze and thaw cycle is the problem, not the cold itself. Water gets into a joint at 40 degrees, expands at 25, opens the joint another fraction, and takes on more water the next week. Do that 30 times between December and March and a hairline gap in exterior caulk becomes a path into the sheathing. That is why the caulk check is part of this visit rather than a spring job.

Basements take the same beating from the other direction. Snow melt against a foundation with poor grade or a short downspout is the single most common cause of the damp basement calls we take in March. Our notes on what winter does to a Michigan basement cover the ones worth acting on now.

Where the heat is really going

Doors and windows get blamed for heat loss because you can feel them. The attic is usually the bigger number and nobody feels it, because the heat leaves straight up through a hatch, some recessed cans and a knee wall nobody has opened since 1994. Our guide to attic insulation in Michigan houses is worth ten minutes before you spend money on anything else.

If the draft complaint is the main reason you are booking, the better fit may be draft sealing and weatherization, which goes after outlet gaskets, window caulk and the attic hatch rather than the outdoor items on this list. Plenty of clients book both in the same visit and save a trip charge.

The garage, the deck and the things left outside

An unheated attached garage pulls heat out of the rooms above and beside it all winter. Sealing the passage door helps. Insulating the space properly is a bigger conversation and sits with garage insulation and heating, which is worth having in September rather than the week the pipes in the garage wall freeze.

Decks want attention before the snow sits on them, not after. Fasteners and finishes stop behaving reliably here once night temperatures drop, which is why our crews stop taking deck staining and maintenance work at a certain point in the fall instead of taking money for a coating that will not cure. The background on that is in our deck maintenance guide.

What we check while we are there

The visit is scoped, but the crew has eyes. Anything we notice goes on a short written note at the end, with no obligation attached to it. Clients tell us that note is the most useful part of the day, because it turns a vague worry about the house into three specific items with a rough order of urgency.

• Grade and downspout discharge at every corner of the foundation
• Exterior caulk at window and door trim, and where siding meets brick or trim
• Sump pump operation and where the discharge line ends
• Storm door closers and any glass that has lost its seal
• Attic hatch seal and any daylight visible from inside the attic

Houses we do this in

Older stock in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti tends to have the original window openings, real wood trim and a basement with a stone or block foundation. Those houses reward caulk and weatherstripping more than almost anything else, because the assemblies are sound and the gaps are the problem. Newer builds out in Dexter and Chelsea leak less air and more often need the gutter and vent side of the list.

We run this package across all six counties, so a rental in Monroe County and a lake house in Livingston County get the same scope and the same crew. The full list of towns sits on our service area page if you are booking for a property you do not live in.

Storm doors, and windows that have lost their seal

A storm door that no longer closes on its own is a heat leak with a handle. The closers are adjustable, the sweeps are replaceable, and both take minutes once somebody is standing there with the right screwdriver. We handle them during the weatherstripping pass rather than writing a separate line for them, because a door that latches properly is what makes the new stripping do its job.

Windows are the harder call. A double pane unit with fog between the panes has lost its seal, and no amount of caulk brings that back. What caulk does fix is the joint between the window frame and the siding or brick, which is where cold air and water actually get in on most houses. If several units have failed, the honest answer is window replacement rather than another winter of sealing around them, and that is a design and build quote instead of a package line.

Sunrooms and three season spaces get their own look while we are there. A room built to be closed up for winter behaves very differently from a four season room built on a conditioned slab, and owners often do not know which one they have until a cold snap tells them. We will say plainly which one is bolted to the back of your house.

What this package will not do

It does not service your furnace. That is a licensed mechanical trade and it wants doing every fall by somebody who does it every day. It does not clean chimneys, and it does not touch the roof surface. We will tell you what we saw from the ladder, and we will not sell you a repair we are not the right company to make.

It also will not fix a house that is losing heat because of what is inside the walls. A 1950s ranch with no wall insulation stays cold no matter how well the doors seal, and the useful conversation there is about the building envelope rather than a half day visit. When that is the situation, we say it, because the alternative is taking your money for a result you will not feel. The cost side of that thinking is covered in what tends to get missed in a renovation budget.

Work we do perform carries the coverage set out in our workmanship warranty. Materials carry whatever the manufacturer offers, which for weatherstripping and detectors is usually straightforward and worth keeping the packaging for.

Booking it at the right time

The honest scheduling advice is to book in September or the first half of October. After the first freeze the gutter work gets unpleasant and the hose bibb advice arrives too late to help. Our calendar in late October fills with people who waited, and we would rather have you in the earlier slot. If you are planning other work this winter, the way we run a project explains how the two fit together.

• Disconnect and drain your garden hoses before the visit if you can
• Clear access to the laundry appliance and to the electrical panel
• Tell us about any door that has been sticking since last winter
• Note which rooms felt coldest last year, since that guides what we check
• Say up front if there are outbuildings you want included

One more thing worth saying out loud. If the house is empty for part of the winter, this package is the wrong one on its own, because an unoccupied house needs somebody walking it rather than a single visit in October. Our monthly vacant home check is built for that, and the two are often booked together.

Where this sits in the rest of our work

Short scoped visits like this belong to the repairs and service side of the company, separate from the design and build calendar so a half day of gutter and detector work does not push somebody’s kitchen back a week. If a parent’s house is on your list this fall, our bathroom accessibility package is the one most often booked alongside this one.

Curious what the crews build when the job is larger? View our Portfolio for finished work across Southeast Michigan. To get on the fall schedule, contact us now for a free quote, or book a consultation if you want the house looked at first.