The first week in a new house, before you unpack

The keys change hands and everybody starts unpacking. It is the obvious thing to do and it is slightly the wrong order.

The first week in a house is the only week you will ever have where you are looking at it with fresh eyes and no habits. Everything you find in that week is still somebody else's problem to explain. By month three, the sticking door is just how the door is, the smell in the crawl space is just the crawl space, and the downspout that dumps beside the wall is invisible because you have walked past it ninety times.

So before the boxes, spend one afternoon finding things.

Find the shut-offs, and turn them

Locating the main water shut-off is not the same as knowing you can operate it. Valves that have not moved in fifteen years seize. Find yours, turn it, turn it back. Do the same at the water heater. Find the gas shut-off and the irrigation shut-off, and note whether any of them needs a tool you do not own.

This is the ten minutes of the whole week most likely to pay for itself, and the only way to do it without pressure is before anything has gone wrong.

While you are at it, open the electrical panel and read the labels. Half of them will be from the original build and no longer true. Whatever you can confirm, relabel.

Assume everything consumable is overdue

Change the HVAC filter on day one and write the size down. Do not assume the sellers did it. Replace the batteries in every smoke and carbon monoxide detector and test each one, including the ones in the hall you have to stand on something to reach. Rekey or change the exterior locks, and account for every key, remote and fob that exists — including the one the previous owner gave a neighbour four years ago and has forgotten about.

Take a photograph of the water meter with the date visible. You will want that reading in a month.

Open the crawl space and the attic

Both of them, with a torch, on purpose.

In the crawl space or basement you are looking for standing water, damp or fallen insulation, rust lines on anything metal, and smell. A musty crawl space is never nothing. You do not need to diagnose it in the first week. You need to know it is there, photograph it, and have a baseline to compare against after the first heavy rain.

In the attic you are looking for staining on the underside of the roof deck, daylight where there should not be any, wet or compressed insulation, and whether the bathroom and dryer vents actually terminate outside rather than into the attic itself. That last one is more common than it should be.

Walk the outside once, slowly, and photograph all four sides

Do this before you change anything, because these photographs become your baseline for everything afterwards. Insurance claims, warranty arguments, and your own memory in two years all improve enormously with a dated set of before pictures.

What to actually look at:

• Where every downspout discharges. Follow the water with your eyes. A downspout that ends two feet from the foundation is putting a great deal of water against the wall. This is the cheapest thing on any house to fix and the most commonly left alone.

• Which way the ground falls in the first ten feet. Away from the house on all four sides is what you want. Settled soil, added beds and years of mulch topping all work against that, and all three are things somebody did on purpose.

• The mulch line against the siding. Soil and mulch should sit below it, not against it.

• Trees, looking up. Dead limbs over the roof are a winter problem you can see in advance.

• Where the irrigation controller, backflow device and zone valves are, and whether the system has been winterised in the past.

• The septic lids or the well head, and when either was last serviced.

The first heavy rain is an appointment

This is the part I would put above all of it, and it is the part nobody does.

When the first real storm arrives, put a coat on and go outside during it. Not after. Photograph where water collects, how deep it gets, and which way it is running. Then check the crawl space the following day and compare it to your day-one photographs.

A dry-day site visit tells a contractor very little. Ten minutes of phone video during an actual downpour tells them nearly everything, and it is the difference between a vague quote and a specific one. If you want the structured version of what to look at, that is the ten-minute drainage check to do while it is actually raining.

Ask a neighbour what fails here

Not what the neighbourhood is like. What fails. Which street floods, which winter froze pipes, whose trees came down, how long the power stays off, which side of the subdivision sits low. People who have lived somewhere through four winters know things that no inspection produces, and most of them will tell you in about six minutes if you ask directly.

In new subdivisions this is worth doing early, because the pattern is usually shared across a whole phase rather than confined to one lot. I wrote about the version of that I see most often in why new construction in Union County floods.

Then unpack

None of this takes more than an afternoon plus one rainy morning, and all of it is easier before the house fills up with furniture and habits.

I put the whole sequence, along with the parts of a move that come before it — the address change tracker, the utilities list with confirmation numbers, the mover comparison and the numbered box inventory — into a Moving Checklist and New Home Setup Planner. It runs from eight weeks out through the first thirty days in, which is the half most moving checklists leave out entirely. It is a fillable PDF, so it can be typed into or printed.

A notebook does the same job. The order is what matters: find things first, then unpack.

Who wrote this

Alex Purdy owns Carolina Terrain LLC in Waxhaw, North Carolina, and holds NC Landscape Contractor Licence CL.1872, the NC State Stormwater Control Measure Inspection and Maintenance Certification (#5970), and NDS Certified Drainage Contractor status. He is not a home inspector, not a real estate agent, not an attorney, and not a licensed general, electrical, plumbing or HVAC contractor. This is a list of things worth looking at, not an inspection and not advice about any particular property.