Tune your doors and windows for the season
Annual · typically October–December
Why it matters
Doors and windows move, sag, and shrink with every season; their seals age out quietly. The result is the drafty house everyone treats as a personality trait when it's actually an hour of foam tape. With ~60–120 freeze days ahead in your county, November is the payoff month — every gap you close this weekend bills the gas company instead of you until April.
This card pairs with your fall caulk walk: caulk seals the fixed joints outside; this tunes everything that moves.
What skipping it costs
$200–$600
Gaps around doors and windows are a hole in your wall the size of a basketball, distributed. That's real money every heating and cooling season — a couple hundred dollars a year, every year — plus cold floors, drafty rooms, and dust and bugs commuting in. Not catastrophic; just a permanent tax you can cancel for $40.
Two ways to get it done
Do it yourself
You'll need: Screwdriver, Incense stick or thin tissue strip, Scissors or utility knife, Foam or V-strip weatherstripping (~$10/roll), Door sweep(s) (~$10–15 each), Silicone spray for hinges and locks, A $1 dollar bill you already have (the gap tester).
- The dollar-bill test: close each exterior door on a bill; if it slides out without resistance, that spot needs weatherstrip or a strike-plate adjustment. Test all four sides.
- The incense test on a breezy day: trace door and window perimeters with a smoke stick or tissue strip. Where it dances, you've found the leak. Check the forgotten leaks too — attic hatch, mail slot, pet door.
- Doors: replace flattened weatherstrip (peel, clean, stick), add or adjust door sweeps until daylight under the door disappears, and tighten hinge screws — one long screw into the stud fixes most sagging doors in five minutes.
- Windows: replace crumbled foam and V-strip, and adjust latches so they PULL the sash tight — a latch that barely catches isn't sealing anything.
- Hit hinges and lock cylinders with silicone spray while you're there. Sticky locks fail in January, on schedule.
Hire it out
$150–$400National fair range — local labor moves this number.
A handyman half-day gets every door swinging true, latching tight, and sealed for $150–$400 — reasonable if you've got a dozen openings and no patience for fiddly work, and strike-plate/hinge tuning is genuinely craft.
The thing to walk away from is the free "energy consultation" that discovers your windows are an emergency. If you want real numbers, pay for an independent blower-door energy audit from someone with nothing to sell — it'll usually tell you what this card just did: seal the gaps, keep the windows.
Ask the tech
- Can you adjust the strike plates and hinges so the doors compress the weatherstrip evenly?
- Which of these windows just need new weatherstrip or a latch adjustment, versus actual repair?
Red flags you're being upsold
- The energy-audit-that's-actually-a-window-pitch: 'your windows are costing you thousands' from someone who sells windows. Weatherstripping is $40 a house; replacement windows are $12,000 — and the drafts live in the gaps, not the glass.
- High-pressure 'today only' window pricing. Windows have been for sale for a long time. They will be for sale tomorrow.
Second opinion time: Any whole-house window replacement quote — and first, an independent energy audit (often $100–400, sometimes utility-subsidized) from someone with nothing to install.
The call
DIY on a Saturday — weatherstripping is the highest-return $40 in home improvement. Say no to every window salesman the drafts attract.