Your first year in a new home

The first week

None of this is maintenance. It's the set of facts you'll wish you had at two in the morning.

• Find the water shutoff, and confirm it turns. This is the single most useful thing you can know about a house.
• Find the electrical panel, and check the circuits are labeled. If they aren't, labeling them is a good Saturday. Whether there's spare capacity for something like an EV charger later is a question for an electrician rather than something to work out by looking.
• Find the fuel shutoff, if the house burns anything.
• Find the sewer cleanout and the water meter box. The cleanout is a capped pipe outside near the foundation or in a basement floor. The meter box is usually at the property line under a lid, and the curb valve inside it needs a long key that you don't own yet. Both are much easier to locate on a dry afternoon than during a backup.
• Find the sump pump, if there is one, and empty a five gallon bucket into the pit to see whether it actually runs.
• Test every smoke and carbon monoxide alarm, and read the date on the back of each. Most are rated for around ten years from manufacture, and previous owners rarely replace them on the way out.
• Change the locks, and find out who else holds a key to anything.
• Note the HVAC filter size, which is printed on the side of the one in there now. Photograph it. You will need it four times a year for as long as you own the house.
• Note the age of the water heater and the heating system. Both are usually encoded on the data plate, and both are the difference between planning a replacement and reacting to one.

The first month

Now the actual habits, starting with the ones that matter most and cost least.

• Change the HVAC filter, whatever the previous owner said. It resets the clock and tells you what a fresh one looks like in your house.
• Test the GFCI outlets in the kitchen, bathrooms, garage and outside.
• Check the garage door auto reverse, if there's one.
• Look under every sink with a flashlight and feel the traps and supply lines. While you're down there, find the little shutoff valves on the supply lines and check each one turns. Every toilet and most sinks have their own, and they're the difference between shutting off one fixture and shutting off the house.
• Run every fixture in the house, including the ones in rooms you aren't using yet.
• Look at the washing machine hoses. If they're the gray rubber ones and you have no idea how old they are, that's a cheap thing to deal with early.
• Walk the outside of the house with the inspection report in hand, and find each thing it mentioned. Reading it on site is a different document from reading it in a lawyer's office.

The first season

Whichever one you've landed in, start there rather than waiting for January.

Spring means gutters, the outside envelope and booking the cooling service. Summer means appliances, exhaust fans and getting ahead of fall. Fall means the chimney, the dryer vent and getting water out of the outdoor lines before the first hard freeze. Winter means alarms, the attic and watching for condensation.

The seasonal checklists split the year up that way. Pick the one you're in and ignore the other three for now.

The first year

Across twelve months, a house asks for roughly a dozen annual jobs: the heating and cooling service, the chimney, the dryer vent, the water heater, the exterior paint and caulk, the driveway, the vegetation, the carpets, the attic twice, the gutters twice, and whatever the garden needs.

That sounds like a lot in a paragraph and is about one afternoon a month in practice. The reason it feels heavier is that the first year is when you're also learning which of them your particular house actually needs.

The things nobody hands you

The paperwork you get at closing describes the transaction. It doesn't describe the building. Over the first year, write down the parts that will otherwise be lost:

• Model and serial numbers for the heating system, the water heater and the major appliances, photographed rather than transcribed.
• Filter sizes, for everything that takes one.
• Who serviced what, and when. Start it with your first service call, even if the entry is one line.
• What the house is made of where it matters: the roof covering and its rough age, and whether the supply lines are copper or plastic.
• Which contractors were good. You will need a plumber eventually, and the worst time to find one is when you need one.

Building the schedule once

What works is smaller: a handful of jobs, each counting forward from the day you actually did it. Patina suggests a starting set during setup and keeps the history, so you can see when something was last done instead of guessing.