Getting the House Ready for a Wet Season

Deal with the doorway first, because in a wet season everything else in the house is downstream of it. Water arrives on shoes, on coats, on the dog, and on whatever gets carried in from the car. If the first two feet inside the door cannot handle that, the moisture just travels, and you spend the whole season mopping a hallway instead of solving one square yard of floor.

I live somewhere with a long grey stretch from late autumn through early spring, and this is the changeover I take most seriously. It is less about deep cleaning and more about setting the house up so that wet weather does not create a daily chore.

Build a landing zone that can get wet

The wet season entry setup in my house is four things, and none of them are expensive.

• A coarse mat outside the door to knock grit off before shoes ever come in. This is the one that does the most work and the one people skip.
• An absorbent mat inside, long enough that both feet land on it. A small square in front of the threshold is decorative, not functional.
• A boot tray with a lip. Wet shoes need somewhere to sit and drip that is not the floorboards. Mine is a plain metal one with a raised edge and a folded towel in the bottom that I swap out weekly.
• Hooks at two heights so wet coats hang and air rather than getting draped over a chair back where they stay damp for two days.

The swap itself takes ten minutes. The lighter warm season mat goes into the wash and then into storage, the heavy absorbent one comes out, and the boot tray comes up from the basement. I do it the same week I switch the bedding over, so I only have to remember one date.

Give wet things somewhere to dry that is not the radiator

Draping soaked coats over a radiator is the instinctive move and it causes two problems: the coat dries stiff and smelling faintly of hot dust, and all that water evaporates directly into a closed room, which is how you get condensation on the windows overnight.

What works better is a drying rack in a room where you can crack a window, or a rail in a utility space with the door shut and the extractor running. The goal is for the moisture to leave the house, not to be redistributed around it. In my house that means the back room with the window on the latch, and it takes about the same amount of time as the radiator would.

Every wet coat you dry indoors puts its water into your air. Either it goes out a window or it ends up on your walls.

Watch the windows, because they tell you what the air is doing

Condensation on the inside of the glass in the morning is not a window problem. It is a signal that the room has more moisture in it than the air can hold once it cools overnight. In a wet season that is common, and left alone it turns into black spotting on the window reveals and along the cold corner of an exterior wall.

Three habits keep it under control here:

• Wipe the sills dry in the morning when there is condensation. It takes a minute and it stops the water sitting there all day soaking into paint.
• Run the bathroom extractor for a good stretch after showers, not just while you are in there, and shut the bathroom door while it runs so it pulls from that room rather than the hallway.
• Open two windows on opposite sides of the house for a short burst in the morning. Quick and wide beats a window cracked all day, and it costs less heat than people assume.

I also pull furniture a few inches off exterior walls for the wet months, particularly the wardrobe against the north wall of the bedroom. Air needs to move behind it. The first winter after I moved in I found the back of that wardrobe spotted, and moving it out four inches solved it permanently.

The basement and anywhere else that smells like weather

If you have a basement, cellar or crawl space, the wet season swap is when the dehumidifier comes back out. Mine runs on a low setting with the hose routed into the floor drain so I am not emptying a tank. Before it goes on I do a quick pass: nothing cardboard sitting directly on the floor, anything stored in plastic bins rather than boxes, and a look at the corner under the front step where water has appeared before.

Check the gutters and the downspouts too, because most wet basement problems start outside. Water that should be leaving the roof and going away from the house instead pools at the foundation. A downspout extension is a cheap fix for a problem that is expensive to solve any other way.

Floors need a different routine, not more scrubbing

Grit is what damages floors in the wet months, not water. Sand and small stones come in on wet soles and then get ground into the finish underfoot. So the wet season floor routine is more vacuuming and less mopping, particularly in the entry and the first stretch of hallway.

On wood, I use a barely damp mop rather than a wet one, and I dry behind it in the high traffic spots. Standing water at a seam is what lifts a board eventually. On tile at the entry I am less careful, because that is what tile is for.

I also keep a small towel by the door specifically for the dog, folded on the boot tray shelf. It is the least elegant part of my entry and it saves more floor than anything else in this list.

The five things I do on changeover day

• Swap the mats, inside and out, and wash the ones going away.
• Bring up the boot tray and set the drying spot with a rack and an openable window.
• Clear the gutters and check the downspouts run away from the house.
• Start the dehumidifier and lift anything off the basement floor that should not be there.
• Pull the wardrobe and the sofa a few inches off exterior walls.

It is under two hours of work, mostly outdoors, and it changes the whole shape of the season. The years I have done it in advance, the wet months have been an inconvenience. The one year I did it in December after the fact, I spent February wiping window sills and wondering why the hall always felt damp.