The East Texas Homeowner's Annual Maintenance Calendar

Your home in East Texas takes a beating that most people in Dallas or Austin can't imagine. Between the 50-plus inches of rain we get every year, humidity that makes metal sweat even in winter, and the occasional catastrophic event like Harvey or Uri, your house is fighting a constant battle against water, rot, and thermal extremes. I watched neighbors in Crosby lose $30,000 worth of HVAC equipment during the 2021 freeze because they didn't know to insulate their attic hatch properly, and I've pulled enough soaked insulation out of Dayton crawlspaces to fill a dump truck.

The maintenance calendar that works for someone in Phoenix doesn't work here. You can't ignore your AC until May when it's already 85 degrees in March. You can't wait until November to think about freeze protection when a January cold snap can drop us to 15 degrees for three days straight. And if you're not checking your foundation monthly during dry spells, you'll wake up one morning to cracks in your sheetrock and doors that won't close.

This guide is built around our specific climate, our specific risks, and the specific way homes fail in Liberty, Chambers, and Harris counties. Every task is tied to a month for a reason, and I'll tell you exactly why the timing matters.

January: What Should You Check After a Hard Freeze?

Check your exterior hose bibs, pressure relief valve discharge pipes, and any exposed PVC within 48 hours after temperatures drop below 28 degrees. These are the three places I find freeze damage on 90% of service calls in January, and catching them early saves you from $800 water bills or foundation settling.

Pull the aerators off your kitchen and bathroom faucets and look for white plastic fragments. That's the inside of a burst pipe somewhere in your walls, and those fragments tell you where to start looking before the slow leak rots out your subfloor. I've seen this exact scenario in five homes between Baytown and Mont Belvieu after Uri, and the ones that caught it in week one spent $400 on a repair. The ones who waited until they saw ceiling stains spent $4,000.

Inspect your attic for wet insulation or condensation on the underside of the roof decking. Our January temperature swings—40 degrees during the day, 25 at night—create condensation problems that don't exist in consistently cold climates. If your attic ventilation isn't right, you'll get frost buildup on the nails poking through your roof deck, then water dripping into your insulation when it melts. Pull back insulation in three spots: near the eaves, at the ridge, and over your bathroom. Wet insulation compresses, loses R-value, and grows mold. If it's wet, you need more soffit vents or a ridge vent before next winter.

Walk your property line and document any tree damage from ice storms. Take photos with your phone's location data turned on. East Texas ice storms drop branches that hang over your roof for months until a summer thunderstorm finishes the job. You want documentation that the damage predates any future insurance claim. I'm talking about the yaupon hollies, water oaks, and sweet gums that are on every property out here. If a branch larger than four inches diameter has a crack, get it removed now. Tree services charge $400 in January and $900 in June when they're busy.

Test your generator if you have one, or buy one if Uri convinced you that you should. Run it under load for 30 minutes—not just idling, but powering your refrigerator and a couple of lights. Change the oil if you haven't since the last outage. The Champion and Predator generators everyone bought at Costco after the freeze need oil changes every 50 hours, and most people ran them 40+ hours during that week. Old oil plus six months of sitting equals a seized engine next time Entergy's grid goes down.

February and March: How Do You Prepare Your AC Before It Gets Hot?

Replace your air filter and schedule your AC tune-up before April 1st, because everyone in East Texas has the same idea in April and you'll wait three weeks for an appointment. By then it's already 88 degrees and your compressor is cycling every eight minutes trying to keep up.

The tune-up should cost $125 to $175 with a reputable local contractor. You're paying for a refrigerant pressure check, contactor inspection, capacitor test, condensate drain flush, and coil cleaning. If anyone quotes you $79, they're going to "find" a $600 repair that may or may not be real. If they quote $300 for a tune-up, they're pricing themselves for rich people in The Woodlands, not for Dayton.

Check your condensate drain line yourself before the tech arrives. Go outside and find the PVC pipe coming out of your house near the AC air handler—usually in the attic or garage. Pour a cup of bleach into the condensate pan access port inside, then go outside and make sure water drips out within five minutes. If nothing comes out, your drain line is clogged with algae. This is the number one service call I run in East Texas from May through September, and it's a $150 visit to fix something you can prevent with a monthly bleach pour.

Clean your outdoor condenser coil in March before the pollen hits. Turn off the breaker, spray the coil with a garden hose from the inside out (pulling debris away from the fins, not pushing it deeper), and straighten any bent fins with a butter knife. That yellow pine pollen we get in late March coats condenser coils like spray paint, and your AC efficiency drops 20% when the coil can't breathe. Twenty percent less efficiency in a 2,000-square-foot East Texas home means an extra $60 on your electric bill every month from May through September.

Inspect the concrete pad under your condenser unit for settling. The clay soils in Chambers and Liberty counties expand when wet and shrink when dry, and AC pads tilt over time. If your unit is more than two inches out of level, the compressor oil doesn't distribute correctly and you're looking at premature failure. You can fix minor settling with a $15 bag of play sand from Lowe's—turn off the unit, lift one side with a pry bar, pack sand underneath. Anything more than two inches of settling, call someone.

Look at your ductwork in the attic if you can access it safely. Flex duct has a lifespan of 15 years in our humid attics, and most homes built in 2008 or earlier are due for replacement. You're looking for sections that sag more than an inch per foot of run, any spots where the outer jacket is torn or separated, and connections that have pulled apart. Sagging ducts trap condensation, grow mold, and restrict airflow. I've measured supply registers blowing 40% less air in homes with collapsed flex duct, and the homeowners just thought they had an undersized AC.

April and May: What Exterior Maintenance Can't Wait Until Summer?

Inspect and repair any wood rot before June humidity makes it worse. Check your fascia boards, window sills, door thresholds, and any wooden porch posts or railings. Press a screwdriver into the wood at a 45-degree angle—if it sinks in more than a quarter inch, you've got rot that needs to be cut out and replaced.

East Texas humidity keeps wood at 14-16% moisture content year-round, which is right at the threshold where rot fungi thrive. The difference between rot and no rot is usually just the quality of the paint seal. Bare wood in our climate will rot, guaranteed. I've replaced entire fascia boards in Highlands that were installed in 2015 because the builder never primed the backside before installation.

Clean your gutters and downspouts even if you have gutter guards. The pine needles, oak leaf fragments, and roof grit that comes off architectural shingles will clog any guard system within two years. Clogged gutters in East Texas don't just overflow during rain—they become planters where Chinese tallow and yaupon seedlings actually root and grow. I've pulled 18-inch saplings out of gutters in Liberty that were lifting the gutter away from the fascia.

Run water through your downspouts with a hose and make sure they're draining at least six feet away from your foundation. Downspouts that dump water next to your foundation are why pier-and-beam homes in Dayton develop soft spots in the floor, and why slab homes in Mont Belvieu get foundation cracks. If your downspout drains within three feet of your house, add a $12 extension from Home Depot. If you're on a slab, you want that water at least eight feet away.

Check your foundation for cracks and movement while the soil is still relatively moist from spring rain. Slab foundations should be walked monthly, but April is your baseline inspection for the year. You're looking for new cracks wider than a quarter inch, any crack that's wider at one end than the other, or cracks that have vertical displacement—one side higher than the other.

Photograph your cracks with a tape measure or coin in the frame for scale. In our expansive clay soils, hairline cracks are normal. Cracks that grow during summer drought are expected. But cracks that appear suddenly or widen quickly indicate a plumbing leak or drainage problem. I've inspected $30,000 foundation repairs that started as a quarter-inch crack someone ignored for 18 months.

Pressure wash your siding, fence, and driveway before it's too hot to stand outside for two hours. You're not just cleaning for appearance—you're removing mold, mildew, and algae that break down paint and wood fiber. The black streaks on your fence aren't dirt; they're algae eating the lignin that holds the wood together.

Rent a 3000 PSI gas pressure washer from Home Depot for $90 a day rather than using your electric 1500 PSI homeowner model. The difference in cleaning speed is dramatic—four hours versus twelve for a typical property. Use a 25-degree nozzle on siding, 15-degree on concrete. Don't use a zero-degree nozzle on anything unless you're trying to strip paint; I've seen people cut grooves in their deck boards with zero-degree tips.

June Through August: How Do You Protect Your Home During Peak Hurricane Season?

Stock your hurricane supplies before a storm forms, not when one enters the Gulf. Once a tropical system crosses 90 degrees west longitude, every Buc-ee's and Walmart between Beaumont and Houston sells out of batteries, water, and gas cans within 36 hours. I watched this exact scenario play out in 2017 when Harvey spun up quickly, and people in Anahuac were driving to College Station looking for generators.

Your basic supply kit for a family of four should include: three gallons of water per person (36 gallons total for three days), non-perishable food for five days, battery-powered radio, three flashlights with fresh batteries, first aid kit, phone charging battery banks, and cash. Keep it in a 27-gallon tote in your garage, not in the attic where you can't reach it if you're flooded in. Replace the water and batteries every January.

Document your home's condition with photos and video before hurricane season every year. Walk through every room, open every closet, and photograph your contents. Go outside and shoot video of your roof, fence, siding, and any outbuildings. Upload everything to Google Photos or iCloud so it's not just on your phone. After Harvey, I watched neighbors fight with insurance adjusters for months because they couldn't prove their fence was intact before the storm or document what was in their flooded garage.

Trim trees and remove dead wood before July. Hurricane-force winds don't break healthy branches—they break the ones that were already compromised. Walk your property and look up. Any dead wood larger than two inches in diameter that hangs over your house, your neighbor's house, or a power line needs to come down. Get quotes from three tree services, and ignore anyone who wants money up front or doesn't carry liability insurance.

The going rate for tree trimming in Liberty and Chambers counties is $400 to $900 depending on size and access. Anyone quoting you $200 is uninsured and will disappear if they damage your roof. Anyone quoting $1,500 for a single tree is bidding for people who don't get multiple quotes. I use local contractors who've been in business at least five years and can show me their insurance certificate.

Check your roof from the ground using binoculars. You're looking for curled shingle edges, missing granules that expose the black asphalt underneath, lifted or missing shingles, and damaged flashing around vents and chimneys. Architectural shingles in East Texas last 18 to 22 years if properly ventilated, less if your attic runs hot because you don't have ridge vents.

If your roof is more than 15 years old, get an inspection from a roofer who doesn't primarily do insurance claims—you want an honest assessment, not someone drumming up business. A legitimate inspection costs $150 to $250 and includes attic ventilation evaluation and decking inspection from inside. If they offer a "free" inspection, they're going to find hail damage whether it exists or not.

Know your evacuation zone and route before you need them. Chambers County uses A, B, C zones. Harris County uses numbered zones. Liberty County uses a combination. Go to your county's emergency management website right now and type in your address. Write your zone on an index card and tape it to your refrigerator.

If you're in Zone A (coastal flooding) or Zone 1 (storm surge), you evacuate for Category 1 or higher. No discussion, no waiting to see how bad it gets. I know too many people who rode out Harvey in Highlands and Crosby thinking they'd be fine because they weren't on the coast. Storm surge reaches 25 miles inland in East Texas, and our flat topography means flooding spreads wide instead of draining quickly.

September and October: What Should You Check As Weather Moderates?

Inspect your attic insulation depth and coverage while it's still uncomfortable up there but not deadly. You want 13 to 16 inches of blown fiberglass or cellulose in our climate zone—that's R-38 to R-49. Measure in three spots with a ruler. If you're under 10 inches anywhere, you're losing $40 a month on cooling costs in summer and $30 in winter.

Adding insulation costs $1.50 to $2.50 per square foot for blown fiberglass, so $2,400 to $4,000 for a typical 1,600-square-foot attic. You'll recover that cost in 4 to 6 years through lower electric bills, and it makes your AC and heater work less, which extends their lifespan. Some contractors will try to sell you spray foam at $4 to $6 per square foot, but blown insulation performs identically in a vented attic and costs half as much.

Check that your insulation isn't covering your soffit vents. I find this on 60% of homes I inspect—the insulation installer just blew insulation everywhere including over the vents at the eaves. Your attic needs intake air at the soffits and exhaust at the ridge or gable vents. Block the intake and your attic becomes an oven that degrades your shingles and makes your AC work twice as hard. Use those foam baffles from Home Depot to create a two-inch air channel from soffit to ridge.

Service your heating system in October before the first cold snap in November. This is the opposite of what most people do—they wait until it's 35 degrees, turn on the heat, and discover their furnace doesn't work. Then they're competing with everyone else for emergency service at $250 trip charge instead of scheduling routine maintenance at $125.

The service should include burner inspection and cleaning, flame sensor cleaning, blower motor lubrication, filter replacement, and thermostat calibration. If you have a heat pump instead of a gas furnace, they should check refrigerant charge, defrost cycle operation, and auxiliary heat strips. Heat pumps are more efficient than gas furnaces in our climate and should be your first choice if you're replacing a system, but they need annual maintenance to stay efficient.

Test your sump pump if you have one, or consider installing one if you have a pier-and-beam home with chronic moisture issues. Pour five gallons of water into the sump pit and make sure the pump activates and discharges water at least 10 feet from your foundation. Pumps fail after 7 to 10 years of regular use, and you don't want to discover a dead pump during a flooding rain.

A basic 1/3 HP sump pump costs $150 and handles most residential applications in East Texas. Install a battery backup for another $250 if you're in a flood-prone area—the power usually goes out during the storms when you need your pump most. I've pulled ruined pumps out of Baytown crawlspaces where the pump would have saved the house if it had run for two more hours after the power failed.

Check your foundation watering system if you have automatic soakers, or set up a manual watering schedule if you're on a slab. Foundation watering in East Texas seems counterintuitive—we get 50 inches of rain a year—but we also get periodic droughts where we'll go 45 days without measurable rain. That's when clay soil shrinks away from your foundation and you get settlement cracks.

Water your foundation perimeter when we go more than 10 days without rain. Use a soaker hose or drip irrigation placed 12 to 18 inches from the slab edge. Run it for 30 minutes per zone, moving the hose around your house perimeter over three days. You want the soil consistently moist but not saturated. The goal is to prevent expansion and contraction cycles, not to flood your foundation.

November and December: How Do You Prepare for Winter Freezes?

Drain and store your garden hoses by Thanksgiving. A water-filled hose connected to your hose bib can freeze back into the pipe inside your wall, and that's a $600 repair minimum. Disconnect, drain, and coil your hoses. Store them in the garage or shed.

Install faucet covers on all exterior hose bibs, even the ones under your eaves. Those foam covers at Home Depot cost $4 each and prevent 90% of freeze damage on properly installed frost-free sill cocks. They work by trapping warm air radiating from inside your wall around the valve mechanism. I put them on in November and leave them until March.

Insulate your attic access hatch if you haven't already. This is the single most cost-effective winterization task you can do—$30 in materials, one hour of work, immediate results. Buy the foil-faced foam board kit from Lowe's, cut it to fit your hatch, and glue it to the backside with construction adhesive. Add weatherstripping around the frame.

An uninsulated attic hatch in an otherwise well-insulated attic creates a 15-degree temperature difference in the room below. Your heat runs constantly trying to overcome the thermal loss through that three-by-three-foot hole in your ceiling. I've measured this with an infrared thermometer in dozens of homes—the fix costs less than your monthly Netflix subscription and saves $20 to $30 per month in winter.

Know where your water main shutoff is and verify that it works. It should be at the street in a concrete or plastic box, or where your main line enters your house. Turn it clockwise to close. If it won't turn, it's corroded and needs to be replaced before you have an emergency. A plumber charges $300 to $500 to replace a main shutoff valve, but that's cheaper than the water damage from a burst pipe you can't shut off at 2 AM.

Tag your shutoff valve location with a stake, flag, or spray paint mark so you can find it in the dark or when your yard is flooded. Take a photo with your phone and text it to everyone in your family. During Uri, I watched a guy in Crosby search for his shutoff with a flashlight while water geysered from his pressure relief valve because he'd never located the valve before he needed it.

Locate and insulate your pressure relief valve discharge pipe if you have a tank water heater. This is the three-quarter-inch copper or PVC pipe that comes out of the side of your tank near the top and runs down to six inches above the floor or routes outside. It's required by code but almost never insulated, and it's usually the first thing to freeze and burst because it's full of standing water.

Wrap it with foam pipe insulation from the valve to wherever it terminates. Cost: $8. Time: 10 minutes. Potential savings: $1,500 in water damage and emergency plumbing. I've replaced 20 of these pipes in the past three years, all freeze damage, all preventable.

Check your irrigation system's backflow preventer and drain it for winter. That's the brass device sticking up out of the ground where your irrigation system connects to your water supply. It has two drain valves—small brass caps or plugs on the bottom. Close the isolation valves on either side, then open the drain plugs and let the water drain out. This device sits outside year-round and will freeze and crack if it's holding water.

A replacement backflow preventer costs $250 to $400 installed, and most irrigation companies are booked solid in January with freeze repairs. Draining it takes five minutes if you do it in November. I mark this task on my phone calendar every year because I've replaced my own twice before I learned to drain it religiously.

What's Your Action Plan for Year-Round Maintenance?

Set phone calendar reminders for every task in this guide on the first day of each month. You're not going to remember to check your foundation on April 1st or drain your hoses on November 15th unless your phone tells you. I use recurring calendar events with the specific task in the event title: "Check foundation for cracks" not "home maintenance."

Keep a home maintenance log in a notebook or spreadsheet with dates and costs for every repair, replacement, and service call. When you sell your house, this documentation proves to buyers that you maintained it properly. When something fails, you know exactly how old it is and whether it's under warranty. When you're budgeting for next year, you can see exactly what you spent this year.

I use a simple Google Sheet with columns for date, task, contractor, cost, and notes. It takes 30 seconds to log each item, and I've got seven years of data that's saved me thousands in unnecessary repairs because I can prove when something was last serviced.

Budget $150 to $250 per month for home maintenance if your house is less than 10 years old, $300 to $400 per month if it's 10 to 30 years old, and $500-plus per month if it's older than 30. These aren't monthly expenses—they're annual costs averaged monthly. Some months you'll spend nothing. Then you'll need a $3,000 AC repair in July and a $2,500 roof repair in November.

Keep this money in a separate savings account labeled "home maintenance" and don't touch it for anything else. When your AC dies in August and you need $6,000 for a replacement, you'll have it. When your water heater fails on Christmas Eve, you won't be putting it on a credit card at 22% interest.

Find three contractors you trust before you need them: a plumber, an electrician, and an HVAC tech. Use them for small jobs first. See how they communicate, whether they show up on time, if their estimates are detailed and fair. Ask for their license numbers and verify them on your county's website. Check their insurance. Read their Google reviews, but ignore any review that's all superlatives and no specifics—those are fake.

Most emergency repairs can wait 24 hours if you know basic shutoffs. A broken pipe becomes a minor inconvenience if you can shut off the water main. A tripped circuit becomes a temporary annoyance if you know which breaker controls what. You make much better decisions when you're not panicking, and contractors charge less for scheduled work than emergency calls.

The East Texas climate is going to attack your home every single day. Water wants in. Humidity wants to rot your wood. Clay soil wants to shift your foundation. Freezes, hurricanes, and 100-degree summers all take their toll. You can't prevent every problem, but you can catch them early when they're $200 fixes instead of $20,000 disasters. That's the entire point of this calendar—turning catastrophic failures into planned maintenance.