Vacation is for fun and relaxation. If you plan on being away from your home for an extended period here are some tips to prepare your home for vacation and take some of your worries away:
- Tell a trusted neighbor/friend that you will be away. Provide them with your contact information if they don’t already have it and see if they can put out your garbage, get your mail and water your plants. If you trust them enough to provide them with a key ask that they do a walk through of your house, not to forget your basement. You don’t want to come home to a flooded basement. Catching any problems early can help prevent more severe damage.
- Don’t post pictures online of you on vacation until you are back from your vacation. You don’t want to shout it to the digital world that you are not home.
- Double check that your windows and doors are locked.
- If you have cameras, make sure they are on and working properly.
- Set timers for your lights and adjust your thermostat. If you have any smart home gadgets, this can be done automatically by setting up a command or using geofencing, so your home knows that you are not home. We went on vacation last week and I forgot to adjust my air conditioning, to my surprise, when I logged into my thermostat app, it already knew I wasn’t home. It had set the air conditioning in “away mode”.
- Shut off your water. This is easy as finding the water main into your home and turning it off. As you can imagine any water issue not caught immediately will cause significant damage.
- Empty your garbage’s and dishwasher. You don’t want to come home to a smelly house.
- Take a photo of your stove, coffee maker or any other appliance that you need to manually turn off. We’ve had multiple trips where we thought the coffee maker was left on, so we had to contact a neighbor to go and check for us. Luckily, it was always turned off.
I hope you found these tips helpful. Let us know in the comments if you have any tips to that you do to prepare your home for vacation.
