How to winterize your home

Winterizing is mostly one idea applied in six places: keep water out of the places it can freeze or collect, and keep heat in the places you are paying to warm. The jobs are ordinary. What makes them worth a list is that they all need doing before the weather makes them urgent, and they all come back next year.

The pass, in order

Protect the pipes first

Disconnect and drain hoses, shut off outdoor faucets at the inside valve if you have one, and insulate pipes in unheated spaces like a garage, crawl space or attic. Know where the main shutoff is and make sure someone else in the house knows too.
Get the heating serviced and the filter changed

Have fuel-burning equipment checked by a qualified professional on the schedule its manufacturer sets. Change the filter, and keep spares, because the one time it matters is the week the shops are busy.
Test the detectors, especially carbon monoxide

Heating season is when carbon monoxide risk is highest and windows stay shut. Test every alarm, replace batteries, and check whether the units themselves have reached the end of the life the maker specifies.
Seal the drafts and reverse the fans

Weatherstrip doors and windows, deal with the attic hatch, and cover or insulate anything that vents. Ceiling fans reversed to run clockwise on low push warm air back down instead of cooling the room.
Look at the roof and the gutters before the snow

Clear gutters so meltwater has somewhere to go, and look for lifted or missing shingles from the ground. Blocked gutters are how you get an ice dam, and an ice dam is how you get water inside a wall.
Have an outage kit that exists before the outage

Torches and batteries, a way to charge a phone, water, blankets, and whatever your household needs for heat if the power is out for a day. Keep it somewhere you can reach in the dark.
Put the annual ones on a schedule

Most of the list above repeats every single year. In MyListResort each task carries its own interval on a shared maintenance list, so next winter arrives with the list already made and anyone in the house can pick up a job.

Which of these repeat

Almost all of them. Filters, alarm tests, gutters, the heating service and the faucet shutoff are annual, and treating them as one-time jobs is why they get missed in the year nobody is paying attention. Put each on a maintenance list with its own interval, check it off when it is done, and it comes back on its own schedule rather than depending on someone remembering in a cold week.

Share it, so it is not one person's job

Winter prep in a household tends to belong to whoever thinks of it first, which means it belongs to one person permanently. A shared list in MyListResort is live on every phone, and a task can be assigned so it is clear who has the roof and who has the pipes. The same list works if you live alone.

FAQ

When should I winterize?

Before the first hard freeze where you live, which is a different date every year and in every region. If you only get one weekend, spend it on pipes and heating: those are the two failures that damage a house rather than merely annoy you.

What is the single most important step?

Pipes. A burst pipe is the most common winter claim and the most expensive thing on this list to repair, and the prevention is cheap: drain the outdoor faucets, insulate what runs through unheated space, and know where the shutoff is.

Do I need a professional?

For anything fuel-burning, yes, on the schedule the manufacturer sets. Draft-sealing, gutters, filters and the outage kit are ordinary household jobs. This guide is a checklist, not a substitute for a qualified inspection.

Will the app remind me next year?

A task with an interval reschedules itself once you check it off, and reminders can be enabled. Treat those as convenience: notifications can be delayed or missed, so nothing safety-critical should depend on one arriving.

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More on this: the fall pass · the maintenance tracker · sharing a house.