A home maintenance checklist for your house, grouped by season

The six questions above the list are not preferences. They are the difference between a checklist for your house and a checklist for a house.

Own or rent decides nineteen rows on its own — the water heater, the gutters, the crawl space, the sewer line. Central heating or air conditioning decides another five. A yard, a fireplace and a car each bring their own block, and whether winters go below freezing decides every row about outdoor faucets, irrigation lines and ice at the roof edge. A renter who never finds those switches scrolls past a third of a list that belongs to somebody else, which is the usual reason a printed maintenance schedule ends up in a drawer.

After that, prune by hand. A condo with a management company loses most of the outside; a house with no basement loses the sump pump. Removing a row is one tap, and there is a button to put them all back if you go too far.

Almost every maintenance schedule you can print is laid out as twelve months, and almost none of them survive contact with a year. The reason is that a month is an arbitrary box. Nothing about the fifteenth of April tells you the gutters need clearing, so the job moves to May, then to the next time somebody looks up at them during a storm.

A season is not arbitrary. The first cold week is a real event that happens in your actual street, and it is the thing that should trigger the furnace service, the outdoor faucets and the chimney sweep. So the sheet groups the jobs the way the weather delivers them: the handful that come round every month or every three, then spring, summer, fall and winter, then the once-a-year jobs with no natural season and the ones that come round every few years and are otherwise forgotten entirely.

That last group is the one worth reading twice. Smoke alarms expire about ten years after they were made, whatever the battery is doing, and a water heater usually gives up somewhere between eight and twelve. Neither of those is on anybody's monthly list, and both of them are expensive on the day they surprise you.

Some of the rows are marked with a dot, and the line above the sheet counts them. They are not the important ones — everything on a maintenance list is important to somebody. They are the ones where skipping a year is how a cheap job becomes an expensive one.

Four kinds of thing end up marked. Water that gets in: gutters, grading, the caulk around the tub, the look under the sinks that finds a leak before the cabinet floor finds it. Heat that gets out or goes wrong: the filter, the service before the cold, the swept chimney. Fire: the dryer vent behind the machine, which the lint screen does nothing for, and the alarms that need testing monthly, new batteries yearly and replacing outright eventually. And things that fail quietly: the sump pump nobody has run since the last flood, the shutoff valve nobody has turned since they moved in.

If you take one of those off the sheet by hand, the page says so once and then leaves it alone. You may well have a good reason. It is worth knowing which ones you decided against.

Every row prints with a tick box and a short blank line, and the blank is the part that matters. A ticked box tells you a job has been done at some point. A date tells you whether the filter is two months old or fourteen, which is the only question you will ever actually have about it.

Put the sheet somewhere the work happens — inside a utility room cupboard, on the back of the basement door, in the folder with the manuals — and not in a kitchen drawer with the takeout menus. A maintenance sheet is consulted twice a year at most, and where it lives decides whether those two visits happen.

One more habit from the households that keep this up: do the seasonal block in one afternoon rather than one job at a time. Spring is ten or eleven jobs, most of them fifteen minutes, and the reason they do not get done separately is that each one costs a trip to the garage for the ladder.

A printed sheet is a snapshot, and it has two failure modes. It cannot remember, so next spring you are looking at a row for the water heater with no idea whether last year's tick was you or the previous owner. And it cannot notice, so nothing tells you that the filter is overdue except walking past it.

You have outgrown the sheet when you have printed it twice and cannot remember what happened between the two. At that point what you need is not a better list but something that keeps the history: the Home Maintenance app holds each job with its own interval, the dates it was actually done, and the manual attached to the thing it was done to, and colors what is coming due. Warranty Vault keeps the receipts and the expiry dates that decide whether a failure costs you anything, and Vehicle Maintenance does the same job for whatever is parked outside, which is the block of rows people most often cut from a house list and then need anyway.

• Maintenance
• Warranty Vault
• Vehicle Maintenance

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. This page stays free either way.

• A realistic weekly family planning routine that takes 20 minutes
• Seven questions to ask any family app before you put your household in it
• Name the invisible work, then see who is actually holding it
• Make a printable chore chart for your family
• Split rent and bills between housemates
• Work out what your subscriptions really cost in a year