What the house needs in December, south of the equator
12 jobs, in three groups.
December is high summer and a month with more going on in the house than in it, so keep the list short and useful. Test the smoke alarms, which takes two minutes and is the most valuable thing here. Rinse the dust off the solar panels from the ground with a hose rather than a pressure washer. Paint an inside room or deep clean the carpets if you have the days, because the windows can stay open and everything dries by evening. Wash the curtains. Clean the barbecue and check the gas hose before the season proper. Oil the garage door track and test the safety stop. Outside, look for a wasp nest in the roof space while it is still small, and wash the bins out in weather that dries them in an hour. The longest day, around 21 or 22 December, brings more than fourteen hours of daylight to Cape Town and Sydney and about thirteen and three quarters to Johannesburg. Many households are away over the holidays, so the leak check on the water meter and the timer on the irrigation are worth doing before you go.
Safety
- Test every smoke alarm
- Every month. See January for how.
- Look in the roof space for a wasp nest
- Early in the summer, in November or December, while any nest is still small. A nest found in December is a small job, and one found in March is not.
- Oil the garage door track and test the safety stop
- In December and again in February, put something solid in the door's path and check that it stops and reverses, then oil the track and the rollers.
Inside
- Run a hot empty cycle in the washing machine
- Four times a year. See March for how.
- Wash the curtains and the blinds
- In December or January, when they dry in an afternoon and the windows can stay open while they are down.
- Deep clean the carpets
- In December or January, when the windows can stay open all day and a cleaned carpet dries quickly. A carpet that stays damp for long can smell worse afterwards than before.
- Paint an inside room while the windows can stay open
- Paint an inside room between December and February, when the windows can stay open and the paint dries quickly. A room painted with the windows shut can smell of paint for a fortnight.
Outside
- Touch up the outside paintwork
- Pick a settled spell of dry weather in early summer. In the Western Cape that is most of the summer; in the summer rainfall regions, go before the afternoon storms usually set in, and give the paint time to cure.
- Wash the bins out
- Still due this month. See November for how.
- Clean the barbecue and check the gas hose
- Before the first braai of the summer: clean the grid and the burners, and check the gas hose and the regulator for cracks and corrosion.
- Clean the decking and oil it again
- Wash it, let it dry for two or three days, then oil it, ideally before the fierce sun of midsummer. Bare decking greys and splinters in the sun, and neither can be put right afterwards.
- Rinse the dust off the solar panels
- Rinse them with a hose from the ground, never a pressure washer, when the dust builds up. In the Western Cape that is the dry summer; in the summer rainfall regions the storms rinse them through the summer and the dust gathers in the dry winter, so look at them in August as well.
Tick them off as you go
This page is the plain list for December. The same list is tickable on the house through the year, where the ticks are kept on your own device and cleared at the start of each year. Nothing is sent anywhere.
The garden half of the month is on the almanac page for December, which covers what to sow, what to plant out and what is ready to pick.