I’m not a winter person.  I never forward to the time of the year where the temperatures drop and the nights get shorter. It’s time to prepare for the long, cold, and snowy winter weather.

There are so many things that must be before you can relax and settle down in your easy chair with you book in front of the warm, crackling fireplace.

I’ve notice a huge difference in the activities and the time it takes to complete them since we moved from our large home on an acre in the country to a small duplex in the suburbs.  Our big country home was a joy to live in, but there are some benefits to living smaller.

Winterizing Our Home – Before

I remember all the things I had to do each year to prepare my home and property for the impending winter weather.  Here’s the short list:

• I would mow the lawn one last time, clean up the lawn mower real good, stabilize the fuel, then try to figure out where I would store it safely out of the weather.
• Finding a winter home for the mower usually meant I had to clean out and reorganize our entire garage (which we needed to do, anyway, so we could fit at least one car in there – my wife’s).
• We would trim back all our plants and shrubs in the garden areas around our house, including the 780 feet of Privit hedges, Arborvitae, and Rose of Sharon that surrounded the borders of our property. All the trimmings would get loaded into our flat-bed trailer and hauled to the landfill.
• I had to blow out and shut down our massive sprinkler system. Then I’d roll up all our hoses and find a shelf in the garage to store them away.
• All of our patio furniture had to be stored under-cover to assure that they would be safe from the coming snow and moisture.
• Our water feature had to be emptied. The vents in our house’s foundation had to be covered up. All tools were put away.

There are so many little things necessary to winterize the house each year. I remember that it took hours each day for several weeks to do it all. It would have been disastrous for us to wait until the first signs of snow.  That would have been too late.

Winterizing Our Home – Today

So one late Autumn day, when I got home from work, I changed my clothes. Then, I went outside with my wife and trimmed back our plants in the garden areas around our home. All of the trimmings filled one garbage bin (along with our one bag of weekly garbage from the house).  I rolled the bin out to the edge of the road in front of our house for the garbage truck to collect it.

Next, we took a few minutes to roll up a hose and tie a tarp over our patio furniture.

Within 45 minutes, we were in the house preparing for dinner.

I loved owning my big house in the country, but I’m really loving the minimalist type of lifestyle in our smallish rented duplex.