Ed 
If you only do one thing for your house in Central Texas this year, run a soaker hose around your foundation before the August drought sets in. That single chore, a cheap hose and a $20 timer, prevents the kind of slab movement that turns into a $15,000 foundation repair. I have watched it happen on both sides. So lets build out the whole year, because foundation watering is just one stop on the calendar.
I have been selling and owning homes in this market for 19 years, and I own a handful of properties myself, so I have repair invoices going back further than I would like to admit. But I am not a roofer, I am not an HVAC tech, and I am definitely not a foundation engineer (I just write the checks to them). So for this one I did something different. I called the trades I actually use, the people who show up at my houses and my clients’ houses, and I asked them a simple question. What is the one thing Austin homeowners should be doing this time of year that they almost never do? This is the year-round maintenance calendar they gave me, season by season, in their words and mine.
Think of this post as the map. If you want the deep, every-cost-and-checklist version, we already built that. It lives in our Complete Guide to Home Maintenance in Central Texas, and I will point you there when a topic deserves more than a few paragraphs. This is the friendlier version. The one you can actually keep in your head.
Why Central Texas Breaks the Generic Maintenance Calendar
Here is the thing most online maintenance checklists get wrong for us. They are written for the whole country, which means they are written for nowhere. They tell you to winterize your pipes like you live in Minnesota and to forget about your foundation because most of the country sits on soil that does not move.
We are not most of the country. We sit on expansive clay (the stuff the soil folks call shrink-swell, and around here Houston Black clay). It swells up when it is wet and it shrinks when it is dry, and your slab rides on top of all that movement like a boat. Add 90-plus days a year over 100 degrees, a roof baking at surface temps north of 140, termite and scorpion pressure that never really quits, and the occasional freeze event this region is genuinely not built for, and you get a house that needs a different playbook. Not a harder one. Just a Texas one. Lets walk the year.
Spring (March to May): The Roof Guy’s Season
Spring is when I call my roofer, because spring is storm season, and storm season is when Central Texas roofs take their beating. The roofer I have used for years put it about as plainly as anyone can. “Most people don’t find out they have hail damage until they go to sell, and by then their claim window is long gone. Get up there, or send someone up there, every spring after the storms roll through.”
That stuck with me, because he is right and it costs sellers real money. A hailstorm comes through in April, the homeowner never looks, and three years later they are sitting at my desk trying to figure out why their inspection flagged a roof that insurance would have paid to replace if they had filed in time. The window closes and nobody tells you.
So spring is the season for eyes on the roof and water moving away from the house. Walk the perimeter, look up. Check the gutters and downspouts, because a clogged gutter in our clay-soil world dumps water right next to the foundation, which is the opposite of what you want. And if you saw any hail at all, get a roofer up there for an inspection, which most of the good ones do for free if you ask.
DIY or pay a pro? The visual check from the ground is yours, no question. Binoculars from the yard tell you a lot. But actually walking a roof in Texas is a great way to get hurt or burned, and shingle hail damage is genuinely hard to read if you are not trained on it. This one is worth a pro, and the inspection is usually free. Spring is also your last clean window to get the AC handled before summer, which brings us to the part everyone procrastinates on.
Summer (June to August): The HVAC Tech and the Foundation Guy Fight for Your Attention
Summer is the big one, and it has two bosses. Your air conditioner and your foundation.
Get the AC serviced before July, not during it
The single most repeated thing my HVAC tech tells me is this. “Call me in April. Do not call me on July 12th, because on July 12th I cannot get to you for a week and a half, and you are going to be sitting in a 90-degree house with a newborn or a 90-year-old asking me to perform a miracle.” He is not wrong, and he is not being dramatic. When a heat wave parks over Austin, every tech in town is buried, and the wait list is real.
There is a reason this matters more here than almost anywhere. Our air conditioners run brutal hours. An Austin system can run well over 2,000 hours a year, often double what a unit in a mild climate logs, with the compressor working from spring through October. All that runtime in our heat shaves real years off the equipment. The national rule of thumb of 15 years quietly becomes a 12-year reality (or less) in Travis County, and Texas heat is widely credited with cutting system life by a quarter to a third. A system that does not get serviced fails even sooner, always at the worst possible moment. A spring tune-up is cheap insurance against a four-figure emergency in the heat.
The cheapest thing on this entire list, by the way, is changing your filter. Do it every 60 to 90 days, and monthly during cedar and oak season when the pollen is coating everything in yellow. A dirty filter chokes airflow and makes the whole system work harder, which is the last thing you want when it is already running flat out. (I keep a stack of them in the garage so I have no excuse. My wife would tell you the stack is mostly decorative.)
Water your foundation like you mean it
Now the foundation. This is the one that separates people who get Texas from people who just moved here. The foundation specialist I trust gave me the cleanest explanation I have ever heard. “Your slab does not crack because the ground gets wet. It cracks because the ground gets wet and then dries out and then gets wet again. Consistency is the whole game. Pick a moisture level and hold it.”
That is it. The villain is not water and it is not drought. It is the swing between them. Taleb’s whole point in The Black Swan is that it is the rare, ignored event that wrecks you, not the everyday stuff, and a slab is the same way. You ignore the moisture swing for years and then one brutal drought collects the whole bill at once. In a dry Austin August with no rain for weeks, the clay around the edge of your slab shrinks, pulls away, and the foundation drops where it lost its support. That is differential settlement, and it is what turns into sticking doors, stair-step cracks in the brick, and eventually a repair bill that makes people physically wince.
The fix is almost stupidly cheap. A soaker hose, run 12 to 18 inches out from the slab, on a timer, 15 to 20 minutes a couple times a week, more when it is bone dry. The goal is steady, not soaked. You want the soil cool and slightly damp a few inches down, never powdery and never a swamp. Forty bucks of hose and timer versus a foundation repair. That is not that hard a math problem right. If you want the full breakdown of what foundation work actually costs and when you genuinely need it, we wrote a whole Complete Guide to Foundation Issues in Texas on exactly that.
DIY or pay a pro? The AC tune-up is a pro, every time, and the filter and the foundation watering are 100% you. There is no skill to a soaker hose. There is only the discipline to actually turn it on, which is the entire problem.
Fall (September to November): Prep Before the First Freeze, Not During It
Fall in Austin is sneaky, because it feels like the maintenance year is winding down right when the most expensive risk of all is loading up. Lets talk about the freeze, because everyone in this town has Uri burned into their memory and for good reason.
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri sat on Texas for days. Austin hit a record low of 6 degrees and stayed below freezing for 164 straight hours, and the Austin Fire Department responded to roughly 2,449 calls for broken pipes during that stretch (those numbers are from NOAA and the City of Austin, and they still make me cold just typing them). Pipes that had been fine for decades burst all over the city, because Central Texas homes are built for heat, not for a week of single digits. The plumbing runs through attics and exterior walls in ways a Midwest house never would.
My plumber, the same one who walked me through the running toilet fix in another post, says the calls he hates most are the preventable ones. “Everybody wants me to come protect their pipes the night before a freeze warning. By then I am booked solid and the hardware store is sold out of faucet covers. The whole job takes twenty minutes if you do it in November when nobody is panicking.”
So fall is freeze-prep season, and it is genuinely a short list. Pull your garden hoses off the outdoor spigots and put covers on the faucets (a disconnected hose is the number one cause of a burst hose bib, because the trapped water freezes and splits the pipe behind the wall). Find your main water shutoff now and make sure you can actually turn it, because the moment you need it is not the moment to go hunting for it in the dark. Know which pipes run through your attic and exterior walls so you know what to drip when the warning comes. None of this is hard. It is just the kind of thing nobody does until the one February it costs them a flooded living room.
Fall is also a fair time to get the heat side of your HVAC checked, since the same system that fought summer now has to actually produce some warmth, and a fall service catches anything that limped through the cooling season.
DIY or pay a pro? Freeze prep is almost entirely DIY and almost entirely free. Disconnecting hoses, covering faucets, locating your shutoff, knowing your dripping plan. That is a Saturday afternoon, not a service call. The only thing I would hand to a pro is anything involving actually insulating or re-routing pipe, which is real work.
Year-Round: Pests Never Take a Season Off
Most of this calendar has a season. Pests do not. That is the whole point my pest guy makes, and he is the one I quoted at length in our how to get rid of ants post, so I will keep it short here. “In a cold climate the bugs go away in winter and you get a break. Here, you do not get the break. Termites, ants, scorpions, fire ants, they just shift gears with the weather, but they never actually leave.”
The big one to watch all year is subterranean termites, because they are silent and they are expensive. If you see mud tubes climbing your foundation or a pier, that is not a maybe, that is a call-a-licensed-pro-this-week situation, since a treatment that would have cost a few thousand dollars turns into structural repairs that can run well into five figures once the damage reaches load-bearing wood. After that it is the usual Texas cast. Fire ant mounds popping up after rain, scorpions sneaking through foundation gaps especially out in the Hill Country, wasps under the eaves. A quarterly pest service handles most of it, and walking your own perimeter a few times a year handles the rest.
DIY or pay a pro? Surface stuff like fire ant mounds and wasp nests, you can knock down yourself. But termites and any infestation that touches the structure, that is a licensed pro, full stop. The cost of being wrong is just too high to gamble on a hardware-store spray.
The One-Page Version
If you forget everything else, here is the whole year in a breath. Spring, get eyes on the roof after the storms. Summer, service the AC before July and run that foundation soaker hose. Fall, do your freeze prep in November when nobody is panicking. And all year long, keep an eye out for termites and change that filter. None of these are hard. They are just the things that quietly save you from the four-figure and five-figure surprises that this climate loves to hand out. The expensive repairs in Texas are almost never bad luck. They are skipped maintenance with a delay on the timer.
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One Last Thing
I am a real estate broker, not your handyman, but here is why I care about this stuff. Almost every painful surprise I see at the closing table, the foundation issue, the dead AC, the roof that should have been an insurance claim three years ago, traces back to maintenance that nobody did because nobody told them it mattered here. A well-kept Central Texas home sells faster and for more, and frankly it is just a better place to live. So I would rather you spend $40 on a soaker hose now than $15,000 on a foundation later.
If you are thinking about buying or selling and you want a straight read on what a house actually needs, or what yours is worth in this market, that is the part I am good at. You can reach out to me here anytime. I have spent 19 years watching Austin homes age, and I am happy to share what I have learned. Be safe, be good, and be nice to your foundation.
