The Best Gift for Your Home This Holiday Season
With the holidays upon us, now is the perfect time to make sure your basement and foundation are in good condition. What do the holidays have to do with your foundation you may ask? Well, if you are like most families your holiday decorations are probably in boxes or rubber bins and stacked against a wall in the basement. With your holiday décor stored away for a year at a time, they can easily prevent you from noticing potential problems happening. As you begin to take down those decorations, we offer a few helpful tips to help prevent big problems with your home.
- Outdoor Lights – As you remove your outdoor lights, this is the perfect opportunity to inspect your gutters to make sure they are in good condition and remain unclogged. A properly functioning gutter will carry rainwater through a downspout and away from your home. Clogged gutters, however, allow water to spill over the sides and pour down your walls, which can result in pooling water around your foundation and could cause erosion which weakens the walls, leading to foundation cracks and settling.
- Basement Walls – Before you store your holiday decorations for another year, inspect the basement walls for vertical, horizontal, or diagonal cracks. If you see small cracks, act now. Contact us today and we will provide a free consultation. Those cracks don’t go away, just because you can’t see them behind your decorations.
- Water Lines – Just like your foundation walls, now is an excellent time to inspect your water lines both inside and outside. In bitter cold temperatures (and during thawing) the last thing you want is a leaking or busted water line. Make sure your inside valves are closed and your outside spicket is open. This will allow any water remaining in the pipe to expand without causing the pipe to break.
- Sump Pump – Test and service your sump pump to protect your basement from leaking pipes and snow melts. If you don’t have one already, consider installing a battery backup sump system. These serve as a backup in case your primary pump becomes inoperable either through mechanical or electrical failure.
Performing these simple tasks as you take down and store your holiday decorations could be the best gift you give yourself all year!
