Looking After a Cape Cod House You Do Not Live In

Freezing, and the two ways a January goes wrong

There are two strategies for a Cape house in winter and they do not mix. Either you keep it heated, with the water live and a thermostat you can see remotely, or you shut it down properly — water off at the main, the supply drained, traps and toilets protected, the water heater and boiler handled the way their manufacturers say, hose bibs and irrigation blown out.

The failures come from doing half of each. A house drained but left with a trapped run of pipe in an exterior wall. A house heated but with the thermostat in a room that stays warm while a crawl space does not. A house where the water was left on because somebody wanted to use the bathroom on a December visit, and then forgot.

A split supply pipe in an unoccupied house does not flood a room. It runs for weeks. It is the single most expensive thing that happens to second homes here and the cheapest to prevent: a low-temperature alarm and a water sensor on the mechanical room floor cost very little and will call you.

What a storm check is actually for

A nor'easter is not a hurricane and does not need to be. Sustained wind and driven rain across a day or two will find every weak point on an exposed building — a lifted shingle, a failed sealant joint, a flashing that was already marginal, a gutter that overflowed into the fascia.

A real storm check is a walk, not a drive-by. The roof from the ground and from the attic. The ridge and the rakes. Flashings at chimneys, skylights and every wall junction. Gutters and downspouts, and where the water is actually landing. Any tree that is now closer to the roof than it was. Then inside: ceilings under the roof planes, the attic decking for daylight or staining, window heads, and the lowest floor.

And the one people skip — confirm the power came back. A house that lost power and did not get it back has no heat, no sump pump, no alarm and no freeze protection, and it may have been that way for days. The Barnstable Conservation Division publishes flood insurance maps and a homeowner's handbook for coastal hazards; if your property is in a mapped flood zone, what you store on the lowest floor and what your insurer expects after a storm both change.

An unheated house moves

Wood responds to humidity, not to temperature, and a house that swings from a damp, closed summer to a dry, heated winter and back again moves more than a house someone lives in. Boards shrink and swell across the grain. Joints open. Mitres in trim show a hairline. Doors that shut in August stick in February. Drywall cracks at the corners of openings, which is where the stress concentrates.

Almost none of it is a defect. It is a building doing what wood does, and it is why judging finish carpentry in the first season after a remodel is unfair to everybody. The fix is usually a caulk line and a touch-up on a second visit, planned in from the start.

What reduces it is steadiness. A house held at a low but constant temperature through the winter moves less than one that is left cold and then blasted to seventy degrees for a February weekend. Long-term humidity control matters more than the number on the thermostat.

The leak nobody is there to find

The expensive water damage in an empty house is never the burst pipe you hear about. It is slow. A supply line at a toilet weeping a few drops an hour. A washing machine hose gone hard at the crimp. An ice-maker line behind a fridge. A relief valve on a water heater passing. A roof leak tracking down a rafter and into the top plate, where it does not show on a ceiling for two seasons.

In an occupied house any of those gets caught in days, because somebody hears it, smells it, or steps in it. In an empty house the first witness is whoever opens the door in May, by which point the subfloor is soft and the framing has been wet long enough to matter.

This is the strongest practical argument for scheduled interior checks rather than an exterior look once a month. Somebody has to go in, run the water, look under the sinks, put a hand on the mechanical room floor, and check the ceilings under the bathrooms.

Access — keys, codes, and who lets the plumber in

A trade cannot work on a house it cannot get into, and an owner three hundred miles away cannot open a door. Every second-home project eventually runs into this, usually at the worst moment: the boiler fails in February and the service company needs someone on site.

What works is boring and it works reliably. One local holder of keys and alarm codes. A written list of who is allowed in. A single point of contact who can meet a propane delivery, an inspector, or an emergency call-out without a chain of phone calls across two states. Smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms tested on a schedule rather than when they start chirping into an empty house.

The case for one company holding the keys

The reason we do property management alongside construction is not that they are similar trades. It is that on a second home they are the same job seen at two speeds. The company that walked the house every month through the winter is the company that already knows the flashing is marginal, the boiler is on borrowed time and the deck boards need doing before the rail does.

Complete Home Group has run three lines of work since the business was renamed in 2014: construction, property management and landscaping. On a house you do not live in, that combination is the point — the same people who notice the problem are the people who can fix it, without an introduction, a second set of keys, or a month spent finding somebody who will come out.

If you are choosing how to cover a house this winter, the useful question is not how often somebody will look at it. It is what happens in the hour after they find something. Ask that of anybody you are considering, including us.