NestBoard
Tick what your home actually has and this builds the checklist for it: the ten minute pass every month, then what each season needs. Print it, put it inside a cupboard door, and stop trying to remember when the gutters were last done.
Almost everything that goes badly wrong in a house announces itself first, quietly, to nobody. A gutter that has stopped draining. A filter that has gone grey. A drip under a sink behind the cleaning bottles. The job of a maintenance list is not to make you handy, it is to make you walk past those things on purpose a few times a year, while they are still cheap.
So the list above is short on projects and long on looking. Ten minutes a month around the house, one longer pass at each change of season, and two phone calls a year to people with ladders and licences. That is the whole system, and it is the same one whether you have just bought your first place or have been in the same house for twenty years.
The monthly pass does not change with the calendar, which is what makes it easy to keep. Test the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. Look at the heating or cooling filter and change it if it has gone grey. Open the cupboards under every sink and look for drips and swollen wood. Clear the dryer lint housing, not just the screen you pull out. Press test and reset on the GFCI outlets. Run water into the drains nobody uses so the traps do not dry out.
If you want a home maintenance checklist by month rather than by season, use this one as the monthly page and take the season block that the month falls into. April gets the monthly six plus the spring list. October gets the monthly six plus the fall list. Nothing else needs to move.
Spring is water and the roof. Clean the gutters, check the downspouts carry water away from the house, look at the roof from the ground for anything not lying flat, walk the foundation for new cracks, and book the air conditioning service before the first hot week when everyone else calls.
Summer is the outside of the building. Clear two feet around the AC unit, drain a few gallons off the water heater to get the sediment out, look at the driveway for cracks worth sealing before the freeze, and walk the perimeter for wasp nests and mud tubes. In storm country, get the weak limbs down in May rather than during a warning.
Fall, or autumn, is the block that actually saves money. Gutters again once the leaves are down, heating serviced before the first cold night, chimney swept before the first fire, outdoor taps drained, irrigation blown out, gaps sealed where mice get in. Almost every expensive thing that happens in January was preventable in October.
Winter is the inside. Find the drafts while it is cold enough to feel them, keep the bathroom fan running long enough to take the moisture out, vacuum the radiators, make sure everyone old enough knows where the water shutoff is, and watch the roof edge for ice after a thaw.
A few things run on an annual or longer clock and fall through the seasonal cracks. Smoke alarm batteries once a year and the whole alarm every ten. The water heater flushed once a year, replaced somewhere around ten to twelve. Septic tanks pumped every three to five years. Chimney swept every year it is used. Dryer vent duct cleaned end to end once a year. Write the date on the sheet each time you do one, because the date is the part nobody remembers.
Set the home type to apartment and the roof, gutters and foundation come off the list, because they are not yours to look after. What is left is real work all the same: alarms, filters, the leak under the sink that becomes your problem if you do not report it, drafts, condensation, and the dryer lint housing. The other rule for renters is that everything structural goes to the landlord in writing on the day you notice it, and you keep the copy.
Here is the honest weakness of any printed list, this one included. It works in week one. By August it is behind the cereal boxes, and nobody can remember whether the gutters were done in the spring or the spring before.
These jobs are recurring household chores, which is exactly what NestBoard already does. Add the ones that matter as repeating chores, monthly or seasonal, and they show up in the week they are due on a screen the whole house can see. Anyone can take one, whoever does it gets the credit, and the date it was last done is recorded instead of remembered. That is the only thing the app adds here, and if the paper version is working for you, keep the paper version.
If you want the same treatment for the everyday jobs rather than the annual ones, our household chore planner builds a cleaning schedule the same way, and the printable chore chart generator is the one for kids.
Split it two ways. Every month: test the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, check the heating or cooling filter, look under the sinks for leaks, clear the dryer lint housing, and run water into any drain nobody uses. Then once a season: gutters and the roof in spring and fall, the air conditioning serviced before summer and the heating before winter, outdoor taps drained before the first freeze, and the chimney swept before the first fire. Everything else on this page is a variation on those two lists depending on what your home actually has.
A short pass every month and a longer one at each change of season is the rhythm that holds up. The monthly pass is genuinely about ten minutes once you know the route through the house. The seasonal pass is a Saturday morning, or a phone call to book someone if it involves a roof, a chimney or a furnace.
The common rule of thumb is one percent of the value of the home per year, set aside rather than spent. Some years you spend nothing and some years the water heater goes. The point of a checklist is not to avoid that money, it is to spend it on a service call in October instead of an emergency call in January, which is usually the difference between one number and three times that number.
Set the home type to apartment or condo and the roof, gutters and foundation jobs come off, because they are not yours. What is left is what actually lands on a renter: alarms, filters, drains, leaks under sinks, the dryer lint housing, condensation and drafts. If something structural is wrong, report it to the landlord in writing the day you notice it, and keep the copy.
Testing the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, and it is not close. After that it is water: gutters that drain away from the house, no dripping supply line under a sink, and knowing where the main water shutoff is before you need it in a hurry.
Yes. No email, no signup, no watermark, no limit on how many times you print it. It is made by NestBoard, a family organizer app, and the only mention of us is one line at the bottom of the printed sheet.
2 weeks free, all features. Five minutes to set up. Bring whoever you live with.