Guide
The Indiana home maintenance checklist
Most maintenance checklists are written for nowhere in particular. This one is written for a state where the first freeze lands on October 26.
Every interval below comes from a federal agency or a university extension.
The short answer
What belongs on a home maintenance checklist
A home maintenance checklist for an Indiana house is pinned to three dates: the normal first fall freeze on October 26, the first hard freeze on November 5, and the last spring freeze on April 15, all measured at Indianapolis International Airport.
A useful checklist is a calendar. The work a house needs does not arrive evenly through the year, and in Indiana most of it is pinned to two dates: the first fall freeze and the last spring one. At Indianapolis International Airport, on a record running back to 1943, the normal first fall freeze is October 26, the normal first hard freeze at 28 degrees is November 5, and the normal last spring freeze is April 15.
Those three dates set the outdoor half of the year. Irrigation has to be out of the ground before the first one. Exterior plumbing has to be safe before the second. Nothing tender goes back in before the third. Everything else fits around them.
The indoor half runs on intervals, and most of those intervals are published by an agency with no product to sell. Those are the ones worth using.
Guide
What to do in fall
This is the expensive season to get wrong, because water that freezes inside something breaks it. Irrigation comes out first. Colorado State University Extension puts the blow out limit at 80 psi for rigid PVC and 50 psi for polyethylene. It also warns never to blow out a pressure vacuum breaker with compressed air, because the rubber seals inside can melt.
Heating gets its service before you need it, not after it quits. ENERGY STAR advises inspecting, cleaning or changing the filter in a central air conditioner, furnace or heat pump once a month, and warns that a dirty filter raises energy costs and can damage the equipment. The same discipline applies to the other half of the year.
- Irrigation blown out at safe pressure, before October 26
- Backflow device left alone, valves and test cocks half open
- Heating serviced and filters replaced
- Gutters cleared, downspouts checked and discharge moved away from the house
- Exterior hose bibs drained and insulated
In practice
The rest of the year
Winter is a watching season. The American Red Cross notes that the pipes that freeze most often are supply lines in unheated spaces such as basements, crawl spaces, attics, garages and kitchen cabinets, so those are the places to insulate. In an unoccupied house this is the whole argument for scheduled visits.
Spring is the audit. Everything the winter did shows up between the last freeze on April 15 and the first hot week: roof and flashing, grading and drainage, the exterior envelope, the irrigation charged and tested zone by zone. Summer is humidity. The Environmental Protection Agency advises holding indoor relative humidity below 60 percent, ideally between 30 and 50, and says that drying wet materials within 24 to 48 hours means that in most cases mold will not grow.
Annual items sit wherever they fit: the dryer vent, the water heater, the smoke alarms. The United States Fire Administration is clear that smoke alarms need replacing ten years from the date of manufacture. We write that date down once at the walkthrough.
Questions
Common questions
What are the most common home maintenance issues?
The ones that cost most are water related, and they are usually invisible for a while: a slow supply line, a failed sump, a blocked gutter dumping against a foundation, and humidity nobody measured. The Environmental Protection Agency's guidance on drying within 24 to 48 hours explains why the delay is the expensive part.
What home maintenance should be done monthly?
Filters, and a look at anything with water in it. ENERGY STAR advises inspecting, cleaning or changing the heating and cooling filter once a month. A visual check of the sump pit, water heater base and under sink connections costs five minutes and catches the failures that get expensive by week six.
How much should I budget for home maintenance a year?
You will see one percent of the value of the house quoted everywhere. No agency publishes it, so it is a habit. Use it to expect continuous spending, not to predict a roof.
How often should gutters be cleaned?
Twice a year is the common interval in a state with this much hardwood, once after leaf fall and once in spring. The right answer is set by what is overhanging the roof, not by a calendar rule.
When should sprinklers be blown out in Indiana?
Before the normal first freeze on October 26, which in practice means early to mid October in central Indiana and earlier in the north. The risk is real from late September; the earliest first freeze on the Indianapolis record is September 30, 1993.
Where we got these numbers
- National Weather Service Indianapolis, frost and freeze dates for central Indiana
- Colorado State University Extension, sprinkler blow out pressures and cautions
- ENERGY STAR, heating and cooling maintenance checklist
- American Red Cross, preventing frozen pipes
- United States Environmental Protection Agency, indoor humidity and drying times
- United States Fire Administration, ten year smoke alarm replacement
- Purdue Extension, watering rates for Indiana lawns
Get started
Let us keep the calendar
The checklist above is the work. A plan means we do it and tell you when it is done.
A plan runs $175 to $350 a month with no markup on any trade.
- We record every system in your house
- The year gets broken out by month
- You stop keeping the list
Request your walkthrough
Both Ned and Luke get an email and a text, and they follow up with you.