The first properly cold night lands on a Tuesday in November. The heating comes on, makes a noise it did not make in March, and you decide to ring somebody about it in the morning.

You ring in the morning. The engineer can come on 6 January.

That is the real failure, and it is why looking up how to get your house ready for winter in November is already late. Nothing on the first page of results is wrong. Twenty jobs, gutters and draughts and alarms, and every result has the same twenty in a slightly different order.

What none of them tell you is which three have to be booked while it is still mild, and which fifteen will happily wait for a dry Saturday.

How to get your house ready for winter, in the order that matters

Every checklist in this category is sorted by room, or by season, and both of those are the wrong axis. Sort the same jobs by how much warning each one needs and the list stops being twenty things and starts being three decisions.

Read the diagram above as a queue rather than a calendar. The top lane has to start first because it is the only one where the delay belongs to somebody else.

You did not forget to winterise the house. You started the queue at the end that could wait.

The three jobs that live in somebody else’s diary

These are the ones worth being slightly early about, and they are also, by a distance, the ones that matter most.

The US Fire Administration’s report on winter residential building fires, covering January to March across 2014 to 2016, puts heating second only to cooking as a cause, at 20 percent of winter home fires. Chimney or flue fires confined to the chimney are another 9.9 percent on their own. Read on usfa.fema.gov, 24 September 2026.

Carbon monoxide runs on the same clock. The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s May 2026 report counts an estimated 274 unintentional non-fire carbon monoxide deaths from consumer products in 2022, of which heating appliances accounted for an estimated 76, the second largest group after engine-driven tools. Across 2020 to 2022, 59 percent of those deaths fell in the four cold months of November, December, January and February. Checked on cpsc.gov, 24 September 2026.

None of that is an argument for anxiety. It is an argument for a phone call in October, when the person you want is still taking bookings.

Here is the version of that phone call that actually happens. In Chirpy you open the Home tool and add one record: Heating service, category Maintenance, provider Dave, renews or due the first Saturday of October. Thirty days before that date, at nine in the morning, every adult in the household gets told. They get told again a week out, again at eight the evening before, and again on the morning itself. Nobody is the person who remembers, because the record is. Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, and none of that is a paid feature.

Add the sweep and the sprinkler blow-out the same way and the top lane of the diagram is done for the year, in about four minutes.

The dry-Saturday jobs, and the week they belong in

Gutters are the one job on any winter list that is genuinely tied to the weather rather than to a date, because leaves come down when they come down. Clear them too early and you do it twice.

The rest of this group is ordinary: weatherstripping where you can feel a draught, sealant round the window frames, outside taps drained and the hoses coiled somewhere they will not split, and ten minutes looking at the roof from the ground with a pair of binoculars.

Here is the honest bit. For this group specifically, a printed checklist taped inside a cupboard door beats any app, because you tick it as you walk round with cold hands and no phone. What paper cannot do is ring you in the first week of October about the heating engineer, which is the job that decides your winter. Keep the paper for the walk round and put the three bookings somewhere that can reach both of you.

The wider version of this, including why about half of any generic list describes a house you do not own, is in our home maintenance checklist by season.

The five-minute jobs are the only ones with a body count

Everything above protects the house. This group protects the people in it, costs nothing, and is skipped more than any other part of the list because it does not feel like work.

• Test every smoke alarm and every carbon monoxide alarm. Press the button on each one. The same USFA report found smoke alarms were not present in 22 percent of nonconfined winter home fires in occupied residential buildings.
• Put a carbon monoxide alarm near the heating. The CPSC figures above are about appliances that are working most of the year and become dangerous in the months nobody opens a window.
• Find the water shut-off valve and turn it. A valve nobody has touched in four years is a valve that will not turn on the night you need it, and the night you need it is not a night for learning where it is.
• Write down who you would ring. The plumber, the heating engineer, the out-of-hours number on the insurance policy. At eleven on a Sunday night, the search is the problem.

A winter list with nobody’s name on it

Ask who books the heating service in your house. You will get a name, and it will be the same name as whoever first heard the noise.

That is the mechanism, and it survives every checklist ever downloaded. Noticing is the job. Doing is the easy part that follows it, and a list with no owner quietly hands the noticing back to the person who already does all of it.

So each of these gets a name. In Chirpy a dated to-do can be assigned, and the four warnings then go to that person rather than to the household, which is the difference between a reminder and an announcement. Unassigned ones go to everybody, on purpose, because a job nobody has claimed is a job the house owns. The mental load household split goes through why splitting the doing while leaving the noticing with one person never feels like half.

Split them by preference rather than fairly. Somebody in the house does not mind phoning tradespeople, and somebody else would rather spend two hours up a ladder than make that call.

Winter itself is mostly watching

Once the queue has run, the season asks very little of you, and what it does ask is a different shape: a handful of things to keep half an eye on rather than tasks to complete.

1. Pipes against outside walls, on the coldest nights. A cupboard door left open is often the whole intervention.
2. The roof and gutters after each storm, from the ground, because ice and wind do their damage in one night and it stays cheap for about a fortnight.
3. Condensation on the windows, which is the house telling you about ventilation before it tells you about mould.

Winter is also the right season for the paperwork nobody does in July, and that is where the money actually is. The home insurance renewal arrives on a date somebody else chose and rolls over at whatever the new price is. A boiler cover contract does the same. Both belong in the same place as the service dates, alongside what those services cost, which over a year is most of the answer to how much does it cost to run a house.

The service sheet the engineer leaves is worth keeping for the same reason a receipt is: it is evidence, and it is evidence you will want in the one week you cannot find it. The general case for that is in keep track of warranties and receipts.

Twenty minutes tonight, and the queue runs itself

This is the part that decides whether any of the above happens, and it is short.

1. Make the two phone calls first. Heating service and, if you burn anything, the sweep. Everything else on this page can slip a fortnight. These two cannot.
2. Put both dates in as Home records, with the provider and what it cost last time. The month-out warning is the one doing the work.
3. Add the dry-Saturday jobs as dated to-dos with a name on each, pointed at a weekend you are both actually free.
4. Test the alarms while you are standing up, then put a record in for January so it happens twice rather than once.
5. Write down where the shut-off valve is and who you would ring. Four lines, and the one evening you need them you will not be searching.

The one thing worth photographing

While the engineer is there, photograph the data plate on the boiler and the service sheet they leave behind. On Chirpy Plus the camera reads the document and fills the record in for you; on Basic you type the four fields, which takes about a minute. Either way it lives against the appliance rather than in a camera roll only one of you can search, so next October you are looking at what was done rather than trying to remember it.

Then leave it alone until the month it matters. Winter prep is like the renewals in our household admin checklist monthly: set up once, silent for eleven months, and loud exactly when it should be.

Common questions