What a Kiawah house needs when you’re away
Four things affect a house here when nobody is in it, and each has its season. None of them is dramatic. All of them are cheap to catch and expensive to find late.
People assume the main risk to a house while they are away is someone breaking into it. In six years of owning a house here, that is not what we have found. The damage comes from the house being closed, and from nobody being there to notice the first small sign of it.
What follows is not advice about how to maintain a house. It is what we look for, in what order, and why — the reasoning behind a standard we walk every visit. If you look after your own house here, it is a list worth having. If you are deciding whether to pay someone to do it, it is what you should expect them to be able to explain.
1 · Spring, February to April
The season people worry about is hurricane season. Spring is the one that catches houses out. Pollen coats everything, warm days arrive early, and a house that has been shut since November has had nobody opening it.
What we look at, in order: ceiling corners and exterior walls on the weather side, because that is where a coastal house shows trouble soonest. Then under every sink, behind every appliance, and the pans under the water heater and air handler — the places where a slow weep does its work for months without reaching a floor anyone walks on. Then whether the systems are actually running, as opposed to being switched on.
We observe and we document; when something needs a licensed company we call the one that services it. The reason to walk the house on a regular interval is that a small problem found in four weeks is usually still small.
2 · Storm season, June to November
Everybody understands the day of the storm. The expensive part is the fortnight after it.
Damage that gets in during a storm often takes weeks to show, and a claim on a second home is a conversation with an adjuster about when the damage occurred and whether the house was being looked after.
So what matters is agreed before the season: who is responsible for what at the house, written down. After a storm, once access is permitted and it is safe, the house is walked against the standard — the perimeter, the crawlspace, the dune side — and photographed the same day, whether or not anything is wrong.
That photograph is worth more than it looks. It is the difference, later, between believing the house was fine on the 14th and being able to show it.
3 · Hard freezes, December to February
The most expensive single thing that happens to a house here is a supply line splitting in a house nobody is in. It runs. It runs until somebody opens the door, and if the house is not visited, that can be weeks.
Nothing about this risk is exotic and nothing about it is seasonal in the way people assume — the freeze that does the damage is usually a short one nobody prepared for, in a week when the house was expected to be fine. It is the clearest argument for a visit on an interval rather than a visit when there is a reason.
4 · The quiet failures, all year
These are the failures that convinced us regular visits matter most. Nothing dramatic happens. Something stops working and nobody knows.
- An irrigation zone stuck on, running against the foundation for weeks.
- A cooling system that has stopped running in a house where every window is closed.
- A weeping valve behind a cabinet, doing its work slowly, well above the floor.
- An ice maker filling a bin nobody is emptying.
- A low-battery chirp on a smoke alarm, weeks old, which tells you something about the last time anyone stood in that room.
Not one of those is found by inspecting the house. They are found by being in it regularly and knowing what it looked like last time. That is the entire case for the standard: the same walk, in the same order, so a change stands out.
Where our part stops
Home Watch is a visual check of a house against a written standard. It is not a licensed home inspection. We observe, we document what we find, and we bring in a licensed and insured independent company when specialist work is required.
If you take one thing from this
Ask anyone you are considering — including us — for a note from a real visit. Not a checklist with ticks in it. A written note that says what was looked at, what was found, the status of each open item, and what it will cost if you want it dealt with. If a company cannot produce that, it is not observing your house against a standard. It is visiting it.
Bonnie Winter is a founder of Vellamore and sets how a visit is done and what a note has to say.