09/07/2026
Rainy season home prep
The worst time to discover a problem is in the middle of a storm, with the rain already coming in and every hardware store closed.
Do these now, while the weather is still on your side:
Clear gutters and drains before the next storm, not during. Leaves and debris are exactly what turn heavy rain into an overflow down your wall. Ten minutes of prep beats hours of damage control.
Check window seals for leaks. Run your hand along the edges and look for gaps, brittle rubber, or old caulk pulling away. A small seal failure is cheap to fix now and expensive to ignore.
Lift stored boxes off the floor. Anything on a garage, storeroom, or ground floor slab should go up on a pallet, a shelf, or even a couple of bricks. Water finds the lowest thing in the room, and cardboard has no defense.
Run the aircon on dry mode to fight humidity. This is the underused setting. It pulls moisture out of the air without freezing the room, which is exactly what you want on those damp, grey, non air conditioned days.
Watch corners and closets for early mold. Look behind furniture, inside cabinets, and along the ceiling edges of exterior walls. Early mold looks like faint grey speckling and wipes away easily. Late mold does not.
None of this takes a full weekend. Most of it is one afternoon, and it's the difference between a rainy season that's just inconvenient and one that costs you.
Save this before you need it 🌧️