New house checklist: what to do in the first week

You have the keys, and for about two weeks every fact about this house is either in front of you or one phone call away: meter readings, where the main shutoffs are, who serviced the furnace last, what the previous owner would tell you if you asked.

Capture it now. This page won't tell you what to fix or what it's worth, only what to write down before it disappears, and most of it does disappear within a month or two.

Example: the real window

Say you close on a Friday and move in over the weekend. By Monday, the shutoffs are found, the meters are photographed, and the smoke alarms are tested. By the following weekend, the inspection report is marked up with a date beside each item, and the previous owner, who's been quick to answer texts so far, has gone quiet.

That's the real window: about a week of easy access, then a slow decline toward zero. None of it is hard. Most of it takes minutes.

Day one, before anything else

These are time sensitive in a way the rest of the list isn't.

The main shutoff deserves its own page, since finding it isn't always obvious and a stuck valve is its own small project: where is your main water shutoff.

Week one, while it's still easy to ask

Once the model plates are photographed, what to write down when you buy an appliance covers which fields are worth keeping for each one, and which are optional.

Locks, codes, and the thing most lists skip

Changing the locks is the item first-week checklists leave out most often. You have no way to know how many keys exist from before you owned the place, so rekey or replace every exterior lock before you move belongings in, not after: the front door, the back door, any gate, and the garage keypad code.

Write the new code or key location down on your own record once it's changed, so it isn't only in your head.

The rest of day-one admin

Forward mail through the postal service, put the utilities in your name from the day you close so there's no service gap, and update your address with your bank, employer and insurer. None of this is specific to a house, but it's exactly the kind of task that gets lost in a move.

If the house will sit empty for a stretch between closing and moving in, check your policy's vacancy clause. Most homeowners policies limit or exclude coverage for vandalism, theft and water damage once a property has been vacant for 30 to 60 consecutive days, which is exactly the situation a slow move-in can create.

Read the inspection report again, as a to-do list

The inspection report was read once, as a buying decision. Read it again now as a maintenance plan, because it's the only document that has systematically gone through the house, and it usually names things that are fine today and won't be in three years.

Pull out anything with a timeframe attached and give it an actual date. That's a maintenance schedule somebody else already did the legwork on.

If you're moving in as the weather turns

A house bought in September or October comes with extra jobs the list above doesn't cover: draining outdoor faucets, servicing the heating system before you need it, and sealing obvious gaps before the cold. Fall home maintenance checklist and winterize your house cover those in order. A spring or summer move skips this section entirely.

When the window has already closed

If you're reading this six months in, most of it is still doable, just harder. The previous owner is less likely to answer, small facts like a filter size are already forgotten, and an unlabeled shutoff takes longer to trace without someone pointing at it.

Start with the highest-value items: the main shutoff, the breaker panel, and the smoke alarm dates, since those matter most in an actual emergency and are worth finding even late. If there's truly no paperwork at all, bought or inherited a house with no records covers how to work out what you have from what's left.

Questions about the first week

What Home Base does with this list

Home Base is built for exactly this kind of capture. Tap what you have during setup, and it asks for the fields that make sense per category, brand and model for a furnace, lease dates for a rental, rather than one form for everything. You can also paste in notes or import a spreadsheet instead of typing each item by hand.

See it in Home Base.