Greater Cincinnati Homeowners Should Prepare For An El Niño Winter

With fall newly arrived, it’s a time of year when local homeowners can breathe a sigh of relief; relax and take it easy. With summer behind us, most gardens require less attention. The demands harsh winter weather will make are off in the distant future— or are they?

This year it might be prudent for local homeowners to mentally remove a month or two from their home maintenance timetables. The reason comes in two familiar words (and they aren’t English): El Niño.

According to the government’s NOAA climate forecasters, there is “an approximately 95% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-2016…” Since that  definitely includes southwest Ohio, they’re speaking to us.  They answer the question, “How strong is this El Niño now?” with, “it’s pretty strong.”  In August, it ranked second all-time (behind August 1997) in the Equatorial Southern Oscillation Index, which is one way of measuring its power. El Niño is the condition where weather shifts occur due to a change in warm ocean currents in the Pacific.

What this means to local homeowners is as unpredictable as…well, as the weather! What is acknowledged is that normal patterns can be disrupted to varying degrees. The reason we can never get much clarity about how it’s going to affect us is that (unsatisfying though this answer may be), winter could be markedly more—or markedly less—stormy than usual. Since the maximum effect is expected in late fall through December (hence the Christmas allusion of the ‘El Niño’ name), local homeowners might consider getting on with their winter maintenance preparations earlier rather than later.

So here—a bit earlier than usual—are some regular fall maintenance heads-ups:

·       Check and fill the exterior gaps where critters, bugs, and cold air might enter

·       Chimney maintenance: if you sweep once a year, schedule now

·       Rain gutter check: even though leaves haven’t begun to fall in earnest, cleaning out the mucky old debris now will make later leaf removal a breeze

·       Inspect the roof: if damage has happened, now is the time to schedule repair

·       Ditto the driveway: fill cracks before winter

·       Now is the perfect time to clean and stain the deck. Depending on how much sunlight it gets, it may need to be renewed annually (no matter what the stain can says!)

·       Replace worn weather stripping around doors and windows—your winter heating bills will reward the effort.

As a check of comments on the weather sites confirms, local homeowners have differing memories of how previous El Niños have affected them. But since we are now officially in an El Niño year—it can’t be a bad idea to prepare ahead of time (and if you have  real estate plans in the offing, now would also be a good time to give me a call)!

Tough Sell: Think about Selling Your Home…to Yourself

If you are at all typical, you probably won’t put even minimal thought into planning for selling your home until there’s a good reason to do so. One of the best parts of being a homeowner is the comfort you feel from having a stable home base. For a lot of us, thinking about selling your home (and then finding another; then moving) produces the opposite reaction. If we don’t have to start planning for migrating the whole household, we’d just rather not, thank you very much.

 In truth, doing this theoretically-only kind of thinking won’t be so disquieting. Since an actual sale and move is nowhere on the horizon, thinking about how you would prepare isn’t nearly as stressful as the real thing. And there are a couple of practical reasons why it can be worthwhile:

REASON 1: When it comes to actually selling your home, you will almost certainly find some minor (and even major) features that must be changed to make the place more appealing to prospective buyers. It might be upgrading or expanding a backyard deck; it might be turning a shopworn kitchen island into a butcher block showpiece.

Some of those upgrades might involve a level of expense that we’d postpone until it was absolutely necessary. Yet as a business proposition when you’re selling your home, such improvements may be just what’s needed to make your place an irresistible buy.

So the first good reason to plan for selling when you have no intention of selling is that, instead of passing on a more livable place to the next owner, you get to benefit from living in the much more livable place yourself! This is really the best reason. It’s amazing how often I hear sellers say, “(big sigh) I wish I’d done that years ago. Why didn’t I do that years ago?”  

REASON 2: When you’re not planning to sell your home anytime soon (or perhaps anytime at all), you have an advantage that won’t be available when selling is imminent. That’s the ability to think about how the place will look and feel five or ten or twenty years down the line—and doing something to make it the best it can be. Most often, this involves landscaping decisions that can be made now for a next to nothing—and yield big dividends later on. Saplings that are inexpensive to plant this year can grow to provide shade and peaceful beauty a decade hence. Likewise, a problem tree that’s perfect right now (but whose roots will one day undermine your front walkway) might be mitigated by a young replacement nearby. When the offending tree has to be removed, the area won’t left barren.

Thinking about the selling of your home long before you have any serious plans to do so is a little like selling your home to yourself. You’re a discriminating prospect, after all. If a few improvements will make the place a richer environment for all the years you and your family will be living there, it’s certainly worth thinking about—and acting on—before the time comes to move on. 

P.S. And just in case the time for selling your home arrive sooner rather than later, I’d be delighted if you will consider giving me a call!