What to Do After Closing on a House

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Closing on a home causes a rush of excitement and an eagerness to move on with your life: but there are things you must complete before you can allow yourself to get carried away.  Each of these steps is vital to starting fresh smartly and making a space your own.

Store Your Closing Packet Somewhere Safely

When you purchase St. Albert real estate, you might be too excited to want to consider starting up a filing space in your home for important documents: but you must!  Whether it's in an office space, on a bookshelf in your bedroom, or in a safe box in one of your closets, you need to store all of your closing information somewhere safe.  Although most paperwork has more than one copy, and many have digital copies, it's essential to treat every piece of house paperwork vital to your home.

Read Too : Buying Housing during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Transfer Utilities

Often scheduled before you even close, for your closing date, or a date soon after: transferring your utilities is vital.  You can achieve this by contacting the company that handles the utilities in your area and ensure that you cover all of them.  This means electricity, gas, water, and trash.  A few of these are combined in many neighborhoods, but you should check first and not assume that applies to yours. 

Change Your Address

The most significant mistake many people make is putting off getting a change of address.  You don't have to go into a USPS location anymore, though!  Instead, visit the government website for the USPS (watch out for scammers that will attempt to rip you off) and fill out this simple form.  The postal service will charge you one to two dollars for the convenience of doing this online, but it’s faster and easier than doing it in person.

Make sure that, following this, you change your address on all credit and debit cards and notify any other business or person that will need to know.  Although the USPS will catch most of your mail, some mail can't be forwarded and has to be sent directly to your home address.

Change Exterior Locks On House and Fences

The rate of people trying to break into their past homes is incredibly low, but you should still attempt to replace the locks on all of your doors and fences.  You never know who the previous homeowners shared their keys with, and it will help you sleep easier at night knowing you and your family are the only ones who can gain access to your property.  You should also change out any fence locks that require keys and possibly even the key to your garage as well.  

Deep Clean and Paint Everything

When moving into a new home, the best way to ensure that it’s ready for you is to clean and scrub down everything.  This means scrubbing out the grout, getting rid of grease and stains in your kitchen, and mopping and deep cleaning every floor.  People more than likely spent a lot of time in the home before you, and deep cleaning takes away the unpleasant surprise of finding a tub drain clogged with someone else's hair or a pile of q-tips behind your toilet from where they missed the trash can.

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