January

Renters live with unanchored furniture because they can't drill.

Your heat comes from burning fuel, which means your house makes carbon monoxide on purpose all winter and exhausts it on purpose — until something interferes: a cracked heat exchanger, a blocked flue, a backdrafting water heater sharing the chimney.

Everything in a modern house has a circuit board in it now — the furnace, the water heater if it's fancy, every appliance with a display.

Here's the thing your semiannual button-test can't tell you: the test button proves the battery and the horn work — not the smoke sensor.

An extinguisher is the one tool in your house where "it's probably fine" isn't a plan — you find out whether it works at the exact moment it's too late to fix.

The lint screen catches maybe 70% of what comes off your clothes.

Electricity that's flowing right doesn't make heat where you touch.

Insurance claims run on evidence, and the evidence has a deadline nobody announces: it must exist BEFORE the bad day.

Your house's era means some or all of its wiring predates modern grounding.

Fire escape planning upstairs comes down to one question: if the stairway is full of smoke, how does each person in each bedroom get down?

Every water disaster starts as a drip you couldn't see: the washing machine hose weeping behind the machine, the water heater rusting through at the base, the supply line sweating inside a vanity.

This card is only for houses with a radon mitigation system already installed — the white PVC pipe running from the slab up through the roof (or up an exterior wall), with a fan unit in the attic or outside.

Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that seeps up from the soil into homes — you can't see it or smell it, and the only house that has a radon problem is one that's been tested and confirmed.

Every bit of air your system heats or cools passes through one filter.

Mini-splits don't have a big furnace filter you swap — they have washable screens right behind the front cover, and they load up fast because the head sits in your living space eating dust, cooking film, and pet hair.

You told us you're not sure what kind of water heater you have — join the club; it's the appliance people interact with least and depend on most.

Water heaters ship set by a factory that has never met your household.

Someday — a burst washing machine hose, a split supply line, a frozen pipe letting go — water is going to be spraying inside your house, and every minute it runs costs you real money.

A house your age has a sewer lateral made of whatever the year offered, and none of the options aged gracefully.

Grout is rigid and belongs on the flat planes of tile.

Every toilet and faucet in your house is fed by a small flexible line, and if those lines are gray or black rubber, each one is a little time bomb with a 5–10 year fuse.

Older dishwashers had hard food grinders.

You told us you don't know your roof's age — totally normal, most homeowners don't, and nobody hands you a binder at closing with this stuff filled in.

You have gutter guards, which means someone — maybe you, maybe the last owner — bought a reduction and was probably sold an elimination.

First, the honest gate: no hot tub, no task — skip this card and enjoy your quarter.

Attic insulation is measured in R-value, but you don't need a meter — you need a ruler, because depth is a good-enough proxy: loose blown insulation runs roughly R-2.5 to R-3.7 per inch.

Every key to your house that existed before closing day is still out there.

You've never actually tested this house's windows and doors — the inspector opened a sample, the sellers stopped noticing years ago.

Every major system in your house has its birthday stamped on a data plate — usually encoded in the serial number — and knowing those dates changes how you spend money for the next decade.

Of everything you inherited from the sellers, the HVAC filter is the item you can reset to factory-new for ten bucks — and one of the most revealing.

Your house has a paper trail, and the first weeks of ownership are when it's easiest to collect — the sellers' agent still answers email, the sellers still remember their vendors, and warranty-transfer windows (some manufacturers give you 60–90 days) are still open.

Somewhere on your property are capped pipes that exist purely for the worst day your plumbing will ever have — and the middle of a sewage backup is the wrong time to learn they exist.

Your breaker panel is the index to your whole electrical system, and right now it's either blank, or — worse — labeled by someone else's memory of a renovation two owners ago.

That red cord hanging from your opener rail is the manual override, and it has a technique.

Your first full month of bills is a diagnostic report about the house, disguised as junk mail.

Everything else on your punch list generates paper and photos: lock receipts, breaker maps, detector dates, meter shots, serial numbers, permit printouts.

You don't know when these detectors were tested, how old they are, or whether the sellers' painter took the batteries out in 2019 and never confessed.

Your find-the-shutoff card covered the inside of the house.