When the weather turns sour, you know to hunker down and stay safe in the storm, or get out of town. But what about if you are dealing with a situation where you need to protect (prepare) your home or vacation home? Do you know what goes into proper protection and preparation? Here are the essentials you should know about to do just that.
Hurricane preparation in hurricane season
Remember where your water is
Sounds silly, especially here on the Sargent / Gulf of Texas, but it’s important. Whether this is for your main home or your vacation home, you’ll want to keep track of where any water, standing or flowing, is in relation to your structure. A hurricane will cause localized flooding, and if your home or RV is only 20 ft from the canal or beach, and not liften, it can lead to extensive flooding in your home.
You’ll need to prepare your home for this likely water invasion as carefully as possible so that you can minimize any damage.
The basics of home protection during hurricane season
To best protect your home and minimize expensive repairs and replacements, here are the basic focal points to help keep water out as much as possible.
Cover your windows
Whether you go with plywood or you instead opt for purpose-designed hurricane shutters, you’ll want to cover your windows before the storm hits. Since a broken window in a hurricane can cause a lot of dangerous wind damage as well as water damage, covering those windows is extremely important. Plus, helps to keep what’s inside safe and dry as long as your home stays intact. With doing this, please note it will make is super dark inside if you lose power, so be sure to have plenty of batteries and flashlights or sources of light since the windows are no longer doing that job.
Rely on sandbags
There is only so much that a humble sandbag can do, but you’ll want to line your entryways and even all around the foundation (particularly if you’re close to water, which most of us in Sargent are) for ultimate protection. These are going to help absorb water that would otherwise freely flow right into your entryways and cause expensive and dangerous damage.
Prepare your property
Often overlooked is property preparation. Bring in any kind of loose furniture (anything not bolted down, basically) that you have, and take down hanging baskets and ornaments that could become projectiles. If you can, dissemble trampolines, or at least ensure that they are tethered as much as possible. This also includes bringing in bicycles and such. Don’t forget to take special care of your boats and other water “toys”.
The last thing in proper maintenance is the potential projectiles from trees! While you’re not expected to chop down a perfectly healthy tree, you will definitely want to clear off any dead branches or limbs that might come loose in high winds and cause damage to your home or RV.
Take stock of what you have
It’s understandable that you don’t want to be worrying about losing your belongings or furniture. However, you will want to ensure that, if you do, you don’t have to try to think about what it is that got lost. If you can, take your most valuable possessions and put them in a safe or another kind of unit where they are protected from harm.
For large pieces of furniture, create a photo log of your pieces both for insurance purposes and just in general so that you know what you have and where it is in case of damage to your home. This also helps with respect to filling a claim against your flood insurance policy… proving you had such items in the first place.
The same goes for information, such as insurance paperwork, wills, and other important documents that you can’t lose. You can put them in a safe, but try to either put them on a flash drive or upload them to the cloud (or both).
Hurricane season means taking a focused approach to protecting yourself, your home and its belongings. The more preventative that you are, the stronger the likelihood that it will at least help when the storm hits!
Of course we are all hoping that nothing drastic happens, but planning for it will make it easier, should it. Prepare now as hurricane season is easily June – November and here in Sargent, Texas, being on the Gulf of Texas, anything can happen.
Contact Gulf Coast Star Realty with any questions about your real estate buying and selling needs. If you are new to the area, check out some local finds or reach out and we will see how we can help. We are locals too, so we have done or are doing these things too!