Going on an extended trip is a great way to break up the monotony of life. Seeing new places, meeting new people, and experiencing different cultures is an important part of an enriched life. However, if you don’t prepare properly, your dream trip can have a very sour ending. Failing to properly prepare your home for your trip could result in you returning to find a lot of problems. To make sure that you cover all your bases, you should at least do these things.
Clean Your Home
Cleaning your home before leaving on a trip has multiple benefits. The most obvious one is that it makes your home more pleasant to return to. You will be tired from all the traveling and returning to a clean home will allow you to relax and recover. Returning to a messy home will just make you think about all the chores that you need to finish. A less obvious benefit is that it will help protect your home from pests. Without you around to scare and kill them, pests may start to enter your home to look for food. If they find food, they are going to stay. If they don’t find food, they will be more likely to leave. Cleaning your home can help make sure there are no crumbs around for mice, ants, and other critters to feed on.
Change Your Sheets
Changing your sheets may sound like a weird thing to need to do right before you go on a trip. However, this piece of advice goes along the same trend as the advice to clean your home. When you get back from your trip, you are going to be tired. Having a nice clean bed to sleep in will be an important part of your post-travel recovery. It also can help prevent any uninvited bugs from taking up residence in your bed while you are gone. This is a pretty easy thing to do and it does make your first night home so much nicer.
Keep the Temperature Regulated
You can reduce energy waste while you’re away by maintaining your HVAC system. You don’t want to have the HVAC running on its normal settings because that will waste a lot of electricity. But you also don’t want to just turn off your heating and air-conditioning. Allowing your house to get too cold could cause problems with your piping. Allowing your home to get too hot could be damaging to some of the things that you have inside. Letting your home experience extreme swings in temperature can cause some of your belongings to warp. This is particularly true of any plastic materials. If you have cans of compressed air for cleaning, high temperatures could cause them to explode. So, make sure that you set your HVAC system to the proper temperature that will keep your home safe, but will also save on energy.
Set Lights on a Timer
While you shouldn’t just leave your lights on, it can be dangerous to have your lights off all the time. If criminals notice that there are never any lights on in your home, they may realize that you have left on vacation. They may take that as an open invitation to visit your home and relieve you of your precious belongings. By setting your lights on a timer, you can make your home appear like it is inhabited. If possible, you should try to vary the times that your lights turn on and off throughout the days that you are gone. That way no one watching the house will be able to pick up on a pattern.
Empty the Fridge
Just like you wouldn’t want to come home to a dirty house, you don’t want to come home to a fridge that is full of nasty food. Before you leave, empty your fridge of anything that might spoil while you are gone. If you don’t, you’ll come back to a fridge full of mold. If you are going to be gone so long that you empty the entire fridge, you may want to just consider unplugging it.
Keep in mind that you won’t want to go shopping when you return home. So, you may want to go out to the store and buy some non-perishable food. That way, when you come home to an empty fridge, you still have something to fill your stomach with until you find the time to run some errands.
Find a Pet Sitter
If you have a pet, you probably don’t want to take it with you on a long traveling vacation. In some instances, you may not even be able to. So, what do you do? You should either find a home pet sitter or a pet hotel. A home pet sitter is nice because they come to take care of your pet in its regular environment. The drawback is that you have to trust the pet-sitter with the keys to your home. A pet hotel is nice because your pet will be given much more professional attention and regular care. However, they are also a bit more expensive.
Shut Off the Water
When things go wrong, they usually will go wrong at the worst possible time. For some reason, it seems that pipes burst much more regularly when you are away from your home than when you are at your home. Nothing ends a vacation on a sour note to discover that your house has been flooded for several days. To prevent any water disasters, you should shut off your water supply before leaving the house. That way, even if something does go wrong, only a limited amount of water can leak out.
Lock Everything
This one should be a no-brainer, but you would be amazed at how many people forget to do this. Sure, they remember to lock the doors to their house, but they might forget to lock a basement or upstairs bedroom window. They also might forget to lock their toolshed. Sometimes people even forget to shut their garage doors. This is very dangerous. Criminals don’t like to make a scene getting into houses. If everything is locked up tight, they may skip over your house in favor of an easier target. If things are left open, you can kiss those belongings goodbye.
Properly preparing your house for your trip may seem like the least of your worries as you finalize your itineraries and scramble to get your packing done. However, it will be well worth your time to do. Doing these things will give you peace of mind that everything is going to be ok while you are gone. You will be able to focus on enjoying your vacation rather than worrying about things back home.
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