Winterize your home in 10,000 easy steps

(A view of fall colors out our front window--lovely, but the cold is coming)

The other day we noticed that our neighbor had blankets over his flowers. It looked a little weird and we thought, "hmmm." But then we checked the weather, and sure enough a freeze was forecasted. Yup, it's frost time.

We don't have flowers to baby, but our tomato and pepper plants seem to be enjoying the cooler weather. At least they've both finally got a couple little fruits coming along (I thought tomatoes were sun worshippers, but next year I'm sticking them in a more sheltered --ie shady--spot). So why let frost cut them off in their prime? Not having blankets we were willing to sacrifice, and since the plants were in containers, we just pulled them into the kitchen. Hey, it's sunny in here. How long can we trick them into thinking it's still production season?

With the coming of cold, we also thought we'd better winterize the house. We've heard that that's something responsible homeowners do. So we googled for details, and now I wonder how any home survives the season. The list of tasks went on and on and on, and I didn't even know what all of it meant (like shutting off the AC water valve. Do we have an AC water valve?).

As we looked closer, though, we realized that some things were just helpful (to get better energy efficiency or to get the yard ready to hibernate), others were important (to keep the pipes from bursting, for instance), and some were downright essential (like making sure the furnace doesn't blow up). So while I'm sure it's all good, maybe we can pick and choose a little bit.

But I'm still intimidated. I'd like to use the fireplace for more than a photo backdrop, but suddenly it seems so dangerous. Do I have to get the thing professionally checked, or can I just rely on our carbon monoxide monitor? And how about the furnace? We opened it to clean the filter, like the manual says to do, but it didn't look anything like the diagram in the manual. If it didn't have the brand name on it, I'd think we had the wrong manual, like maybe the one for the bathtub.

One thing for sure, we know we need to wire one of our smoke alarms back in. See, one night about 3 am we woke up to that annoying, piercing beep that smoke alarms emit every thirty seconds when they're low on batteries. So we dragged over a chair and Uchenna tried to take it off the ceiling. He wrestled it and wrestled it, and that stupid beep wouldn't stop. About the time he realized that it was actually wired in to the house's power supply (so it won't just twist off, and of course has no battery to be low), I noticed that there was a little light blinking down near my feet--a CO monitor plugged in. That's where the beep was coming from; apparently it was letting us know that it was malfunctioning because it was old.

Our only defense for being so slow is that we had been awoken at 3 am by an incredibly annoying, piercing beep. But you may be thinking, as we sometimes do, that we're not adult enough to be responsible for a house (I'm not even mentioning the times we left the garage door open all night, or the time I left the water on in the hose with a nozzle and the hose burst and flooded our neighbor's yard. Fortunately it was during the heat of summer, and they were grateful for the extra watering). Uchenna says sure there's a lot to do, but now that it's frosty he's SO glad to have a garage and not have to scrape the car in the morning. I guess that means that, in spite of everything, there are perks.