Buying a new home, especially if it is your first property, is a remarkably exciting time. There are likely to be a number of ideas floating around your head, especially with regard to interior design and layout. However, before you get carried away with a paintbrush, it is important to prepare your home, laying the foundations for the years ahead and ensuring that your home remains safe, secure, and comfortable.
Safety First
Installing both smoke and carbon monoxide detectors within a home should always be the first port of call. These unintrusive devices will make your home immediately safer and are believed to reduce fire-related injury and death by over 50%. Additionally, while many modern devices will alert residents as their battery levels decrease, it can be worth using this period of time to make a note to check the levels manually in six months’ time.
Check Meters
Setting up a home’s utilities is another important step, one that requires an initial checking and familiarisation of meters. Not only is this essential for ensuring that your home’s energy bills are accurate but they are also likely to highlight the location of other important assets, such as stop clocks and fuse boxes, items that, in an emergency, will be beneficial to know about!
Garden Design
Gardens are increasingly sought after on the property market as the outdoor space they offer to residents, as well as the associated benefits, become more widely celebrated. When taking on a garden space, however, especially one with decadent features like ponds and log cabins, homeowners should ensure that they are familiar with the outdoor space’s seasonal resilience.
Landscapes can falter in heavy rain and harsh winds, with lawns flooding and trees blowing over. There is also the issue of potentially invasive or problematic weeds, which should be identified and controlled early on, before they become too established.
Paint Your Walls
Painting early on is highly recommended as, once furniture and boxes have been unpacked, homes will quickly feel too established. With shelving put up and furniture set in place, it can feel exhausting to reverse the process and once again return to boxes so that there is room to add different colours to walls and ceilings.
As such, before you unpack, make a decision on paint colours and get to work. Then, once it’s dried, begin unpacking and relax knowing that you won’t need to pack again any time soon.
Inspect The Property
If your new home has been previously lived in, it pays to do a thorough check after the handover. Beyond the initial inspection required before purchasing a property, it benefits new homeowners to familiarise themselves with various aspects of the home, highlighting issues that might only become apparent when spending a greater deal of time in the property.
If these issues are identified early, they can be remedied early, minimising the impact they might have later on down the line, as well as any potential costs associated with property defects worsening.
