Outdoor Home Maintenance Tasks You Must Keep Up With

Last updated: October 16, 2023

It’s time to own up and be honest, how many of you actually perform regular home maintenance tasks? A lot of you are nodding your heads defensively saying you do stuff all the time. You’re always vacuuming the house or dusting surfaces – not a week goes by when you’re not tidying up around the house. Okay, fair enough, but what about the other home maintenance tasks you’re forgetting? 

Interior home maintenance is much easier to keep up with as the tasks are obvious. You see dust, so you clean it.

You know the floors are getting grubby, so you sweep and hoover them. All of these maintenance tasks happen naturally – but what about the ones outside your home? Outdoor home maintenance is just as important as indoor maintenance, though most of us neglect some common tasks. You’ll see a collection of essential outdoor maintenance tasks below and it’s your job to ensure you keep up with them! 

Mowing the lawn/trimming the garden

Those of you with a “natural” garden will need to perform plenty of maintenance. By “natural”, we mean a garden with greenery and plant life. You have a grassy lawn, bushes, maybe some trees, plants, etc. Some of you might spend a lot of time gardening already, in which case many small maintenance tasks – like pruning plants – will already be taken care of. 

Nevertheless, everyone needs to ensure they’re mowing the lawn or trimming back their garden regularly. This is probably one of the most forgotten and neglected tasks – especially during the colder months. Grass will still grow in winter, meaning your garden is normally very overgrown come the start of spring.

Aim to mow your lawn once a week during the summer and then reduce it to once every few weeks in the autumn/winter. Basically, you want to trim the lawn before it looks too long. The same goes for bushes around the garden too; give them a snip now and then so they don’t enclose your garden area and make it look like a forest.

Cleaning the patio/decking

If you have a patio/decking, it will need to be cleaned regularly. Patios are easier to maintain as the concrete slabs don’t need a lot of extra work done to them. Simply sweep away debris every few days to prevent leaves and dirt from building up. 

Cleaning a decking is harder because the materials are different. Granted, you can get modern decking made from aluminium, as shown at https://clearambershop.com. This is better than composite wood decking as it is much easier for you to clean and keep tidy. Still, both options are harder to maintain than patio paving. You will need to clean your deck more regularly, so head out there and sweep everything away almost daily. 

When you leave your deck for too long between sweeps, debris can be caught between boards and you might see moss and weeds start to grow. This creates a whole other problem for you to deal with, so it’s better to clean it regularly instead. 

Gutter cleaning

While you’re outside, angle your head up towards the roof of your house. Look at the guttering and you’ll soon realise it needs a thorough cleaning. It could look discoloured and nasty, but the main problem is the collection of wet leaves stuck in the gutters. They can cause blockages to your outdoor drainage system that may lead to water damage in your home. 

As a result, gutter cleaning is a vital home maintenance task you must keep up with. The only problem is that it’s a pretty awkward thing to do. If you live in a bungalow, it is much easier to clean the gutters as you can use a small stepladder to get to them. For larger homes, using a ladder becomes a much greater risk. Instead, you have two solutions: 

• Call a professional gutter cleaning service
• Use a telescopic gutter cleaner

Either option works, but the second is probably more favourable. You will find telescopic gutter cleaning tools online that work like massive hooks. You stand outside your house and reach up with the tool as it hooks over the gutter and can sweep or blow away debris from inside. It’s much easier – and less expensive – to do this every few weeks than to call someone each time. Maybe get a pro in if your gutters haven’t been seen in ages, and then continue the maintenance yourself. 

Cleaning the windows

Again, this is comfortably a home maintenance task we forget about all the time. Windows can get very dirty extremely quickly due to bad weather. If it rains, your windows will have horrible rain spots that make them look so dusty and dirty. Likewise, spray from cars passing by or the wind carrying debris in the air will make them look horrific. 

You should get into the habit of cleaning your windows at least once a month. Some people will find window cleaning services that operate on cleaning schedules. Effectively you set up a payment system and they come to your house at the same time every month. It means your windows are guaranteed to be cleaned monthly by professionals. Sometimes, you can even choose to do this twice a month or more frequently. 

Alternatively, nothing’s stopping you from cleaning the windows yourself. The bottom ones are easy to do with a window cleaning spray and the right tools. You can even reach higher windows by either using a telescopic cleaning brush or trying to get them from inside the house. Speaking of which, don’t forget to clean the inside of your windows too – people always forget this as well! 

And there you go; the outdoor home maintenance tasks you must keep up with. Trim your garden to stop it from looking overgrown, look after your decking so it doesn’t rot or encourage weed growth, unclog your gutters and keep your windows clean. All of these tasks are relatively easy to do and will help you maintain a clean home exterior that looks fantastic.