It’s an amazing feeling stepping inside your new home for the first time, but before the chaos of unpacking begins, it’s a great idea to familiarize yourself with some critical aspects of your new home. I’m talking about the tasks you might not have thought about, like locating the electrical panel or water mains.
Here’s some essential tasks to consider when you move into your new home:
- Locate manuals – Hopefully the previous owners have put aside the manuals for things like the air conditioning unit and kitchen appliances, if they haven’t you can find the missing ones online and download them.
- Create a folder – You should keep everything together in one place, put all the manuals, invoices and receipts for your equipment in a folder. This will save you a lot of frustration later on if you ever need to find warranties or a user manual.
- Check the locks – Walk around the house and check that you have keys for all the locks. You might even want to consider changing the locks, especially for the entry doors. Who knows who’s been given a key by a previous owner – a babysitter, dog-walker, cleaner?
- Check alarms – It’s never a bad idea to replace the batteries in your smoke alarms, this will prevent any unexpected beeping in the middle of the night.
- Run the AC – Turn on the air-conditioning unit and make sure it’s running correctly. If you have a ducted system, see if each room is getting the benefit of the cooling system. It’s also a good idea to check when it was last serviced and arrange a technician if it’s required.
- Find the shut-off valve – This will be located near your water meter. It might be in the front yard near the fence line, attached to an exterior wall, or in an underground box with a lid over the top. Once you find it, you don’t need to do anything, just remember where it is in case one day you need to shut it off.
- Locate the electrical panel – This will be in a grey metal box, usually hung in the garage or attached to the exterior of the house.
