Winter 2025 was one of the wettest the Met Office has logged, and the first half of 2026 has already thrown three named storms at the UK. By the time you read this, most homes have soaked, frozen, dried and soaked again — and almost nothing has been looked at. Summer home maintenance UK homeowners can actually do in a weekend matters more this year than last, because the small failures the wet winter caused (a slipped tile, a hairline crack, a tired boiler seal) are about to be tested by the August heat and the September rain. The 12 checks below take an afternoon, cost almost nothing, and stop the £300 problem becoming the £3,000 one.
Why the window between now and July matters
Insurers see the biggest spike in escape-of-water and storm-damage claims between October and February. The work that prevents those claims — clearing a gutter, re-bedding a ridge tile, servicing a boiler before the autumn rush — is dramatically cheaper and easier to book in June than in November. Gas Safe registered engineers run 30–40 percent cheaper for a boiler service in summer than during the first cold snap, and roofers in the South East are quoting two-week lead times now versus six-week lead times by mid-October.
Treat the next six weeks as your home's MOT slot. Booking the small jobs now is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for the house this year.
The 12-point summer check
- Roof, ridge tiles and chimney
Start at the top. From the pavement, walk all four elevations with binoculars. You are looking for slipped, cracked or missing tiles; daylight at the ridge; lead flashing that has lifted away from the chimney stack; vegetation in the verge. If you spot anything, get a roofer to quote before mid-July — that is the cut-off before autumn pricing starts to climb.
- Gutters and downpipes
Six months of leaves, moss and grit accumulate over winter. Blocked gutters are the most common cause of soaked external walls, internal damp patches and, in older properties, rotten fascia boards. Clear them yourself with a ladder and a trowel if the roof line is single storey and you are confident; otherwise pay £80–£150 for a gutter clean in most of the South East. Run a hose through afterwards — if water sits in any section, you have a fall problem, not a blockage.
- Brickwork, pointing and external cracks
Walk the elevations. Hairline cracks under a window or above a door, or stepped cracks in mortar joints, are usually cosmetic but occasionally diagnostic of movement. Photograph anything wider than a £1 coin and mark the date. If you photograph it again in September and the crack has grown, that is when you ring a RICS surveyor — not before. Loose or missing pointing is a more urgent fix: it lets water sit in the wall through winter.
- Windows, doors and FENSA paperwork
Check every seal. Bead the glazing units for misting (failed double glazing). Test every lock and hinge. While you have the file open, find your FENSA or CERTASS certificates for any windows installed since 2002 — buyers' solicitors will ask for them when you sell, and chasing the installer five years later is painful. Store the PDFs in your Home+ logbook now, while you remember.
- Book the boiler service
The single biggest summer win. A boiler service by a Gas Safe registered engineer typically costs £90–£140 in 2026. Book it in June or July. If you let your landlord-licence engineer lapse on a rental, you also need a CP12 gas safety certificate — the £80 you save by skipping a year is dwarfed by the fine for non-compliance. While the engineer is there, ask them to bleed every radiator and check the expansion vessel pressure.
- Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms
Test every alarm by pressing the button. Replace 9V batteries; 10-year sealed alarms past their date go in the recycling, not back on the ceiling. Since the 2022 update to the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm Regulations, every storey of a rented property must have a smoke alarm and every room with a fixed combustion appliance needs a CO alarm. Owner-occupiers are not legally bound to that standard — but it is the standard you should hold yourself to.
- Outside taps, stopcocks and irrigation
Find your internal stopcock now, not in the middle of a leak. Turn it off, then on again — if it is stiff, free it now. Check the outside tap for drips and frost damage. If you have an irrigation system, run it through a full cycle and watch for unexpected wet patches on the lawn (a burst supply line will surface within a few minutes).
- Driveways, paths and patios
Weeds in block-paving joints lift the blocks over time. A stiff broom, a jet wash and fresh kiln-dried sand restores most driveways in a Saturday afternoon. Look for trip hazards — a paving slab that has dropped 10mm is the slip-and-claim that pushes your buildings insurance excess up at renewal.
- Trees, hedges and boundary planting
Bird nesting season runs to the end of August, so check before you cut. Tree branches overhanging the roof scrape tiles every time it blows; ivy on the chimney stack pulls mortar out. If a neighbour's tree is the problem, take photos and write to them — that paper trail matters if it ever becomes a claim. Trees within a couple of metres of the house in heavy clay (most of Surrey, Kent, Essex) are the ones to take seriously: subsidence risk in a dry summer is real.
- Ventilation, extractors and trickle vents
Open every trickle vent on every window. Clean the kitchen extractor filter (degreaser, hot water, half an hour). Run the bathroom extractor and time how long it takes to clear a foggy mirror — if it is more than three minutes, the fan is tired. Poor ventilation is the root cause of most 'damp' problems homeowners panic about; it is the cheapest thing to fix.
- EPC, insulation and the energy paperwork
Find your EPC. If it is older than 2016, the score is probably wrong — heating efficiency assumptions have changed twice since then. A new EPC costs £60–£100 and is the document buyers and lenders ask for first. While you are in the loft, look at the insulation depth: current best practice is 270mm of mineral wool. Most lofts are at 100–150mm. Topping up is a £200–£400 job that pays back inside three winters.
- The Home+ logbook itself
The last check is the records, not the bricks. Photograph everything you just inspected. Upload boiler service certificates, FENSA paperwork, EPC, insurance schedule, and any receipts from the work above into your Home+ logbook. When you sell — or, more likely, remortgage — every one of those documents will be asked for. The household that has them filed sells four weeks faster than the household chasing them at the eleventh hour.
The one thing most homeowners get wrong
The standard advice is to inspect your home in spring and again in autumn. That is wrong for the UK climate in 2026. Spring is too wet, autumn is too late, and the trades you want are already booked. The right window is the second half of June through the first half of July — long days, dry brickwork, engineers with capacity, and enough time to fix what you find before the equinox storms arrive. Move your annual home check to that window and you will pay less, wait less, and stop more problems before they cost real money.
What to do in the next 30 minutes
Walk outside with a phone and photograph each elevation, the roof line, and the gutters. Save the photos to your Home+ logbook with today's date.
Open your calendar and book a 2-hour slot on the next dry Saturday for the 12-point check.
Search 'Gas Safe register' for engineers in your postcode and email three for a boiler-service quote — the cheapest June slot wins.
Find your stopcock, your EPC, and your FENSA certificates. If you can't, that's tomorrow's job.
Keep the list — and the receipts
Home+ exists so you only have to do this once and then keep it. Add today's findings, photos and receipts to your free Home+ checklist — the app reminds you in October when it is time to drain the outside tap, and again next May when the summer MOT comes round again.
Related reading on the Home+ blog: "Your annual UK home maintenance calendar" and "How to find a Gas Safe engineer you can actually trust".
Authority sources used in research: the Gas Safe Register (gassaferegister.co.uk) and Energy Saving Trust guidance on loft insulation (energysavingtrust.org.uk).
