The winter checklist every North Georgia second home needs

A mountain house does not experience the winter its owner reads about. The forecast you check is for the nearest town, and the nearest town is usually eight hundred to fifteen hundred feet lower than your driveway. Every hundred feet of elevation costs roughly three-tenths of a degree, so a low of 34°F in Jasper is comfortably below freezing at a house above Big Canoe, for longer, and with more wind moving across exposed crawl spaces and north-facing walls.

That gap is where most winter damage lives. Not in the dramatic ice storm, which everybody prepares for, but in the ordinary cold snap that arrived four degrees colder than the phone said it would, at a house nobody visited for eleven days.

What follows is the sequence we walk before a home closes up for the season. It is ordered by what actually costs money when it goes wrong.

1. Water, because water is the whole game

Ninety per cent of serious unoccupied-home losses are water. Not fire, not theft. Water, escaping slowly, into a house where nobody is listening for it.

• Know where your main shutoff is, and turn it off. If the house will be empty for more than a week or two in winter, shutting the main and draining the lines removes the entire failure mode. A supply line that cannot supply cannot flood.
• Drain what holds water. Exterior hose bibs first, and disconnect every hose, because a hose left attached traps water against the valve and splits it from the inside. Then irrigation, then any line running through an unconditioned space.
• Deal with the water heater deliberately. Vacation mode is the usual answer. Full drain-down is the right answer for a house closing until spring, but only if someone competent refills it, because a tank element energised dry is ruined in seconds.
• Pour antifreeze in the traps. Non-toxic RV antifreeze in every sink, shower, tub and floor drain, and in the toilet bowls and tanks once drained. A dried-out trap lets sewer gas back into a closed house, which is how a home smells wrong for a month after opening.
• Check the crawl space before the cold, not after. Vents closed, insulation intact and actually attached, no standing water, no visible rodent entry. Half the frozen-pipe calls we see are a pipe that was never insulated in the first place, in a crawl space nobody has looked at in three years.

2. Heat, set low rather than off

The instinct to shut the heat off entirely is understandable and usually wrong. A house held at 55°F costs meaningfully less than one held at 68°F, and it keeps interior wall cavities, where the pipes you cannot drain live, above freezing.

• Set the thermostat to 55°F and confirm the system actually reaches it. A furnace that has not run since March may not run in December.
• Replace the filter before closing, not after opening. A restricted filter is how a system that would have run fine instead trips out on a cold night.
• If there is a propane tank, fill it. Running out at 20°F on a road nobody can get a truck up is a specific and avoidable kind of misery.
• Open interior doors and vanity cabinets so heat reaches the plumbing runs behind them. Closed cabinet doors under a north-wall sink are a reliable way to freeze a supply line in an otherwise heated house.
• Reverse ceiling fans to push warm air down, and leave them on low if the house is tall. Stratified heat in a great room does nothing for the pipes at floor level.

3. The exterior, and the things above it

North Georgia winters are wet as often as they are frozen, and a house on a wooded lot spends the season under whatever the trees drop on it.

• Clean the gutters after the leaves finish falling, not during. Late November, once the oaks are done. Gutters cleared in October are full again by Thanksgiving, and a full gutter in a freeze becomes an ice dam that pushes water backwards under the shingles.
• Confirm downspouts discharge away from the foundation. Extensions get knocked loose by mowers all summer, and nobody notices until the crawl space is wet.
• Look up at the trees. Deadwood over the roof, over the driveway, over the power drop. Ice loads limbs far past what wind ever does, and a limb taken down in November costs a fraction of the roof it lands on in January.
• Store, stack or strap the deck. Furniture, umbrellas, grills and planters, anything that can move in a 50 mph gust or crack when the water inside it freezes. Ceramic pots do not survive a mountain winter outdoors.
• Clear the chimney and close the damper. If the fireplace will be used at all, get it swept before the season; if it will not, make sure the damper is shut and the cap is intact, because an open flue is both a heat leak and a way in.

4. Power, alarms and the things that tell you

A closed house should still be able to say something is wrong. Most cannot, because the sensors that would say it are on a network that fails silently.

• Fresh batteries in every smoke and CO detector, and a low-temperature alarm somewhere near the coldest plumbing run. A $40 sensor that texts you at 40°F is the best value in this entire list.
• Verify the alarm system, cameras and thermostat are still connected, and that alerts still reach a phone number somebody carries. Internet at an empty house drops out constantly, and a camera that has been offline since October is not watching anything.
• Unplug what does not need to be plugged in. Surge damage during a winter storm is common and entirely preventable for electronics nobody is using.
• Empty the refrigerator and either run it or prop the doors open. A powered-down fridge sealed shut for four months is a biohazard by March.

5. Access, before the road is bad

This is the step owners skip, and it is the one that turns a small problem into a large one. If nobody can get in, nothing above matters.

• Make sure at least one trusted local person has current access and current codes. Codes that changed in September do no good in January.
• Confirm the driveway is passable and that whoever plows or salts it knows the house is empty and has your number.
• Hold a paper list somewhere in the house: shutoff locations, panel location, well or septic details, HVAC and plumbing contacts, alarm account number.
• Suspend or redirect mail and deliveries. A porch stacked with boxes is the clearest signal available that nobody is home.

The three most-skipped items

After a season of walking closed-up houses, these are the ones that go missing:

1. Antifreeze in the traps. Everybody drains. Almost nobody pours.
2. The crawl space. It is cold, it is dark, and it is where the failure will happen.
3. Verifying alerts still arrive. Installing a sensor is not the same as testing that its message reaches you.

Closing a house is not a single afternoon of work. It is a sequence, and the value is in someone doing it in the same order every year, and then coming back to look.

The part a checklist cannot do

Preparation reduces the odds. It does not remove them. A pipe still bursts, a limb still comes down, a heat pump still fails at 3 a.m. in a house that did everything right. The difference between a $600 repair and a $60,000 claim is entirely how many days pass before somebody notices.

That is the whole argument for scheduled visits through the winter rather than a single closing-day checklist. Someone walks the same route, records what they see, and calls you the moment it stops matching the last visit.

If you would rather not run this list yourself this year, book a consultation. Seasonal home preparation is included from the Concierge membership up, and available à la carte to anyone.