It’s May in Phoenix, Arizona and it’s getting hot! You and your retired Snowbird friends are heading for a cooler climate. Here are 35 strategies to help you secure your home for your departure.
There are a number of general things to do in preparation for “flying north.” Make sure to update your emergency contact information with your Home Owners or Community Association including giving them the name of your emergency key holder and who has a key. If available, sign up for any Vacation Watch programs your community offers. Some police departments have vacation check programs. Notify them, and generally they will do a routine check of the house. While some will only drive by and look for suspicious activity, some will get out of their vehicles and inspect the grounds looking for any break-ins. If contact information is left with the police, they can phone the homeowners if there has been a break-in or disturbance. Check to see if you need to renew your driver’s licenses and/or vehicle plates before leaving.
Arrange for services such as landscaping, pest control and pool services if needed. Contact your internet provider and cable company to stop service or start vacation hold. Arrange for mail forwarding and newspaper stop. Ask a neighbor to pick up stray newspapers, flyers, packages etc. and make sure that neighbor has your contact information and a key. Ask the neighbor to park in your driveway occasionally to make the home looks occupied. Consider using a professional home watch company to care for your home.
If you have never done so, take photographs or videos of all your expensive items. If needed this would be helpful for both the police and the insurance agency to identify the stolen goods. Store valuables in a place that a burglar could not access. (i.e., take jewelry to a safe-deposit box, lock computers in closets, hide keys to extra cars, etc.) Be sure to remove all valuables from sight.
In the kitchen remove food from the house to discourage pests. Store staples such as sugar or flour in sealed metal, glass or thick plastic containers. The best refrigerator solution is to turn it off, empty it and prop open the doors. The next best solution is to empty out items which will spoil and add items like bottles of water, etc. to help retain the cold and help the unit use less energy. Don’t forget to turn off the ice maker and place a box of baking soda in the refrigerator to absorb odors. If you have candles and plan to leave your refrigerator on, place the candles in the fridge so they don’t soften during the summer.
Regarding other appliances, put 2-3 tbsp. of vegetable oil in the dishwasher to keep the seals moist. Do not latch the door. Also put 2-3 tbsp. of vegetable oil in the garbage disposal to help keep it from locking up. Remember to unplug other appliances throughout the house. Open the door on the clothes washer.
With telephones turn off the ringers so thieves can’t hear if no one is answering the phone. Don’t leave a message on the answering machine that tells callers you’re out-of-town. Instead, say you’re away from the phone and you’ll get back to them.
To help add moisture for the furniture place several 5 gallon buckets of water around the house. Close blinds. If using timers, leave the blinds open slightly to let light shine out so the home looks occupied. Open all doors to rooms and closets to allow for air flow.
Regarding water, in the bathrooms wrap toilet bowls with cling wrap to keep the water from evaporating. Do not put bleach tablets in the tank. Turn off inside water valves at the washer, under sinks, and at toilets. Valves like to be used. Better yet, shut off the main water valve when leaving.
Change the furnace filter(s) especially if you are leaving the A/C on. You could turn it off completely but if not, set it to a high temperature (95) in the summer. Check / close fireplace damper. Lock all doors and windows placing wood dowels in the tracks of sliders where possible.
Outside the home pick the remaining ripe fruit from trees to avoid falling fruit accumulating under the tree. Trim trees and bushes away from the house so as not to obscure windows and doors. Set the irrigation timer to the summer watering cycle. Replace the 9v battery if not done so in a while. Drain water features and treat with appropriate chemicals to avoid mosquito infestation. Store the patio furniture and barbecue grill in the garage.
Speaking of the garage, disconnect the car battery. Leave golf cart batteries on trickle charge. Fill the golf cart batteries and car battery. Turn the water heater to vacation or pilot. Disconnect hot water circulator or set it to the off position.
Just before leaving shut off the house main water valve but do not touch the landscaping water valves. Unplug the garage door opener or lock garage door. Turn on the security system if you have one. Double check that all doors and windows are locked making sure the door between the garage and the house is locked. Leave by the front door and lock it!
Now you’re set to enjoy your trip!
Roger Selway is owner of Sun Valley Home Watch in Surprise, Arizona. A former home improvement contractor in Maryland, Roger now offers house sitting and home watch services to seasonal and part time Arizona residents. Go to his website www.sunvalleyhomewatch.comfor more information.
Filed under Plastic Ice Buckets Articles by on Sep 6th, 2010. Comment. 
Moving your home over a great distance of more than one days’ travel makes it necessary to stop over for the night somewhere. And that’s the twilight zone of residency: the hotel town. The little rest stop village that exists for no other reason than to be a way-station between Point A and Point B. It’s impossible to miss; it’s the one with the U-Haul and Ryder trucks next to it.
After you’re seen enough hotel towns, they all tend to blend together. Do they, in fact, exist in the same dimension as the rest of the world? Do they fade back into the ether as soon as they vanish from our rear-view mirror the next morning? All of them have such a transient atmosphere, you have to wonder about the kind of people who stay there for life. Did they find it too hard to survive in the real world? Are they hermits or drop-outs? Were they born and raised there?
Sometimes the hotel town goes on for so long like this, it becomes a ghost of itself. Take “Primm”, otherwise known as “Stateline”, a town straddling the border of Nevada and California in the United States. It is as halfway to anywhere as you can get. You can stand in Primm and look away along the I-15 in either direction and see it stretch out across nothing at all, an endless limbo of desert. There in Primm, you have the minimum number of each type of business required to make it a viable town. The stench of failure makes visible waves rise off the city that are visible from the farther crest of the mountains. Nobody is in Primm because they wanted to be; everybody is there because they couldn’t make it in Las Vegas.
You pull into this moldering graveyard in your rented truck towing your car, having carefully dodged every speed trap on the way in. The wife and kids are apprehensive; they want this to be an overnight vacation, a fun place, but everything looks good until you get up close to it and you smell the mildew and rust, and see the apathetic, laconic employees who shy away from being put to work like a vampire avoiding garlic. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. There’s a pool! Oh, it’s closed. Look, a roller coaster! On second thought, it doesn’t look like it can hold itself up, let alone me. Well, here’s a coffee shop. Ah, do you see anybody working here?
You are able to acquire boarding for the night, though, and so you get your allotted space on the fourth floor, where the only window is facing the wall of the hotel next door. There is the faded, utterly characterless room with the air conditioner that smells funny, the carpet that is suspiciously off-color, the fuzzy color TV at the foot of the bed, the lumpy mattress that you flip over to make sure there isn’t a dead hooker hidden in the box-springs, the plastic bucket for the ice machine that every single hotel has for some unknown reason, the no-name brand bottles of shampoo and bars of soap. You can go downstairs to the casino floor, but there’s almost nothing but fruit machines and video poker down there. And even the machines look like they don’t come to Primm until they break down in Vegas and get refurbished here. The employees are the walking dead.
How better is the heartland hotel town, where at least the place seems to have some other reason to exist besides being a tourist trap. There’s farms around there. Another town or two is close to the area, so at least the natives look like they’ve had verifiable fun on at least one occasion in their lives. When you get a quaint little cottage inn with a restaurant attached and a perky staff and some actual sight-seeing around the area, you feel like you’re in special luck.
Sometimes you even feel like staying for an extra day. This is the perfect remedy for the crabbiness that inevitably sets in when the whole family has been on the road for a few days crammed into the front of the moving truck. There’s bruises in your sides from each other’s elbows, your legs feel permanently cramped, and you’re just ready for a meal, any meal, as long as it’s on a plate and is to be eaten with a knife and fork with sitting at a table. There’s only so long you can exist on little bags you get through the window.
Staying for an extra day at a motel town that’s actually worth staying at is best handled by having the tiredest person stay inside for a day of TV-watching in bed, while everybody else gets out and walks a tour of the town for the day, splitting up into the smallest possible groups. That way everybody gets a break from each other as well, which is a blessing when you spend three days at a time crammed next to them on the road.
Jack manages a backload furniture removalist company in Australia. The company specializes in quality interstate furniture removalist. Based on the Gold Coast in Queensland but moving homes nationwide. Quality assured furniture removals company, . Moving home Australia wide has never been easier than with Jack and the guys at Mardi Gras backloading furniture removalist
Filed under Plastic Ice Buckets Articles by on Sep 4th, 2010. Comment.
