Your First 30 Days in a New Home: The Checklist That Sets Up Everything

There's a strange window right after you move in. The boxes aren't unpacked, you don't know which switch controls the porch light, and every creak sounds like a problem. It's also the single best moment you'll ever have to set the house up properly, which is exactly what a good new home checklist is for. You will never be more motivated than you are right now.

The right new home checklist isn't about deep cleaning or paint swatches. It's the unglamorous stuff: knowing where the water shutoff is before a pipe bursts, registering the appliances before the paperwork vanishes into a junk drawer, and building the maintenance schedule while you still care enough to do it.

Here's the 30-day version, week by week. None of it is hard. Most of it costs almost nothing. And all of it gets dramatically harder to do in month six, when the house has faded into background noise.

The 30 days at a glance

Week	Focus	Rough time
Week 1	Locks, codes, and shutoffs	2 to 3 hours
Week 2	Paperwork, registrations, and utilities	2 to 4 hours
Week 3	Meet the systems you bought	2 to 3 hours
Week 4	Build the maintenance calendar	1 to 2 hours

If you only have energy for one thing per week, do these in order. Week 1 protects you from emergencies. Week 4 protects you from everything slower than an emergency.

Week 1 of your new home checklist: locks, codes, and shutoffs

Change every lock and code

You have no idea how many keys to your house exist. The sellers had some. So did their dog walker, their cleaner, their in-laws, and possibly a neighbor from 2019. Assume the number is "several" and make it zero.

Rekeying typically runs $80 to $160 for a locksmith visit covering a few doors, or roughly $25 to $60 per lock if you swap the hardware yourself. If any locks use interchangeable-core or SmartKey-style cylinders, you can often rekey them in minutes with a kit.

Then get the non-key entrances, which people forget:

• Garage door keypad code
• Garage opener remotes (the sellers may still have one clipped to a car visor, so wipe and re-pair the opener)
• Alarm system codes and account ownership
• Any smart locks, cameras, doorbells, or thermostats still tied to the previous owner's accounts
• Mailbox lock, if it's a shared cluster box with a key

Find every shutoff before you need one

This is a one-hour job with a flashlight, and it's the difference between a wet floor and a ruined ceiling. Locate three things:

1. The main water shutoff. Usually where the water line enters the house: basement wall, crawl space, garage, or a buried curb box outside. Turn it off and back on once so you know it actually works. Older gate valves sometimes seize.
2. The gas shutoff. At the meter outside, plus individual valves behind the stove, dryer, and water heater. You typically need a wrench for the meter valve, so know where one lives.
3. The electrical panel. Find it, make sure nothing blocks it, and check whether the breakers are labeled honestly. "Bedroom?" with a question mark doesn't count. Labeling is a 45-minute two-person job: one person flips breakers, the other walks around checking what died.

Take a photo of each shutoff location. Future you, standing in rising water, will not remember.

Week 2: paperwork, registrations, and utilities

File the closing documents while you can still find them

Right now your closing paperwork is in one folder, or at least one pile. That will never be true again unless you act. Gather the deed, settlement statement, inspection report, seller's disclosures, survey, title insurance policy, and any warranty transfers.

Scan everything. You'll want the settlement statement at tax time, the inspection report when something the inspector flagged finally acts up, and the disclosures if a surprise turns out to be less of a surprise than the sellers claimed. A cloud folder works fine; an app like Casamia keeps them attached to the house itself, alongside the appliances they refer to, which saves the "which folder was that in" scavenger hunt later.

Register the appliances while the stickers are still on

Walk the house with your phone and photograph the model and serial number plate on every appliance: furnace, AC, water heater, fridge, dishwasher, washer, dryer, range, garage opener. This takes 20 to 30 minutes and you only ever have to do it once.

Then register anything still under manufacturer warranty. Registration makes warranty claims smoother and, more importantly, gets you on the list for safety recalls. If you're fuzzy on what a manufacturer warranty covers versus a home warranty versus insurance, this breakdown untangles the three, because they cover very different failures.

Set up utilities and keep every confirmation email

Electric, gas, water and sewer, trash, internet. Most transfers happen in a week, but the details scatter fast: account numbers, autopay confirmations, the trash pickup schedule, which day recycling alternates.

Make a single folder (email label, cloud folder, wherever) and drop every confirmation into it. Six months from now, when a bill looks wrong or a service claims you never signed up, that folder earns its keep. While you're at it, brace yourself for the bills nobody mentions during the sale; the hidden costs of homeownership tend to show up in exactly this first billing cycle.

Week 3: meet the systems you bought

You bought a house, but you also bought a water heater, an electrical service, and an HVAC system, each with its own age, lifespan, and opinion. Spend an evening getting introduced.

The water heater

Find the manufacture date. It's encoded in the serial number, and the manufacturer's website will decode it in seconds. Tank water heaters typically last 8 to 12 years. If yours is past 10, you're not in crisis, but you should start pricing replacements now, calmly, instead of at 6 a.m. on a holiday. A standard tank replacement typically runs $1,200 to $2,500 installed.

While you're down there, look for rust at the base, moisture on the floor, and the drain valve you'll use for annual flushes.

The electrical panel

Check the main breaker for your service size: 100 amps is common in older homes, 200 is standard in newer ones. This matters the day you want an EV charger, a heat pump, or a hot tub. Also note the panel brand. A few older brands, like Federal Pacific and Zinsco, have known reliability concerns, and if you have one it's worth a licensed electrician's opinion, typically a $100 to $250 service call.

The HVAC filter

Change it in week 3 at the latest, honestly sooner. You have no idea how long the previous owner's filter has been in there, and a clogged filter makes the system work harder and die younger. Filters typically cost $15 to $40 depending on size and rating. Write the size on the filter housing in permanent marker so you never have to measure again.

The ten-minute safety pass

Test every GFCI outlet with its own test button. Press the test button on each smoke and CO detector, replace batteries, and check the manufacture dates on the back: smoke detectors age out at roughly 10 years, CO detectors at 5 to 7. Run every faucet, flush every toilet, and run the dishwasher and washing machine once while you're home and paying attention.

Week 4: turn your new home checklist into a real calendar

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that determines whether the house stays easy to own. Motivation decays fast. A maintenance calendar doesn't.

Sit down for an hour and create recurring reminders for the basics:

• HVAC filter change, every 1 to 3 months
• Gutter cleaning, spring and fall
• Water heater flush, yearly
• Smoke and CO detector test, twice a year
• Dryer vent cleaning, yearly
• Exterior caulk and grading walk-around, yearly

The seasonal maintenance checklist covers the full list and the timing. What matters this week is getting the recurring reminders to exist somewhere you'll actually see them. Casamia builds this schedule for your specific home and syncs it to Google or Apple Calendar, but a plain calendar you'll actually check beats a perfect system you won't.

One more thing while you're at it: start a contractor list. The first time a plumber, electrician, or HVAC tech does good work at this house, save their contact with a note about what they did and what it cost. Two years of that and you'll never cold-call a stranger during an emergency again.

The bottom line

The first 30 days set the tone for the whole time you own the house. Week 1 handles security and emergencies, week 2 captures the paperwork before it scatters, week 3 introduces you to the systems that will eventually need you, and week 4 converts a burst of new-homeowner energy into a calendar that works when the energy is gone. All in, it's roughly eight to twelve hours spread across a month, and most of it costs under a couple hundred dollars. Do it now, while the house still feels new. Nothing on this list gets easier with time, and a few things get expensive.