What to check on your house before the rainy season

Sacramento gets maybe four real storms a season, but they arrive fast and they arrive together. Most of what goes wrong in a house here in December was visible in September — it just never got looked at.

Here's what's actually worth twenty minutes before the first storm, and what can wait until spring without costing you anything.

Worth doing now

Gutters and downspouts. If a gutter is holding leaves, the first heavy rain sends that water somewhere it shouldn't go — usually straight down the side of the foundation. Pull the leaves, run a hose through, watch where it comes out the bottom.

Downspout extensions. Water should land at least four feet from the foundation. A lot of Folsom houses built in the late 90s have extensions that got mowed over or kicked loose years ago and nobody noticed, because it only matters when it rains.

Exterior caulking around windows and trim. Small gaps don't leak much on their own, but they let wind-driven rain track behind siding. Worth a walk-around with a flashlight on a bright day, when shadows show the gaps you'd miss at noon.

Weatherstripping on exterior doors. Press a dollar bill in the door jamb and close it. If it slides out with no resistance, the seal's gone and cold air — and rain — is getting past it.

Roof valleys. Not the whole roof, just the valleys, where two slopes meet. That's where debris collects and where a small clog turns into a leak two storms later.

Crawlspace vents. If your house has one, check that vents aren't blocked by stored items or overgrown landscaping. Standing water under a house is a slow problem that gets expensive quietly.

What can wait until spring

Repainting exterior trim, resealing a deck, and replacing a roof that's merely old but not leaking — none of that is weather-critical in October. A cosmetic fix rushed before a storm usually gets redone in better weather anyway, so there's no upside to doing it now.

If something on this list turns up a real problem — a downspout that's actually cracked, a valley that's actually clogged with a decade of debris — that's a fixed-price job, not a mystery. We'll tell you what it costs before anyone gets on a ladder.