Moving week runs on adrenaline and pizza boxes. The furnace filter is not on your mind. But the first week is the one window when you'll crawl, climb, and open every panel in the house anyway — and the jobs below take minutes now, versus a panicked YouTube search at 11 p.m. with water spreading across the floor. Do them in roughly this order.
Everything in this group is free and takes about twenty minutes total. It's also the group people skip, right up until a supply line lets go.
Find the main water shutoff — and turn it. It's usually in the basement or crawl space where the water line enters the house, in a utility closet, or near the street meter. Turn it off, open a faucet to confirm the water stops, then turn it back on. A valve that hasn't moved in fifteen years may be seized or weeping; better to learn that on a calm Tuesday than during a burst pipe.
Locate the breaker panel and label the circuits. The panel is often in the garage, basement, or a bedroom closet. Half the labels will say "lights/plugs," which helps nobody. With a helper and a phone, flip breakers one at a time and write down what actually dies in each room. Relabel with a marker and tape.
Find the gas shutoff if you have gas service. The main shutoff sits at the meter outside; individual appliances — furnace, water heater, stove — each have their own shutoff valve on the line behind them. You don't turn these for practice. Just know where they are and what they look like, so a sulfur smell doesn't send you searching in the dark.
Find the water heater's shutoff valve too. It's on the cold water line running into the top of the tank. When a heater leaks — and an old one eventually does — this valve and your drain pan are the difference between a mop job and a flooring replacement. While you're there, note the tank's age from the label; you'll want it for job 10.
Change the locks or have them rekeyed. The previous owners, their dog walker, a neighbor, two former cleaners, and a contractor from 2019 may all have keys. You'll never know. Rekeying the existing locks is cheaper than replacing them and takes a locksmith under an hour for the whole house. Do the garage-to-house door too — it's the one everyone forgets.
Test every smoke and CO detector. Press the test button on each one. Then check the manufacture date printed on the back or side. Smoke alarms older than ten years and CO alarms older than seven to ten (it varies by model) get replaced outright, not just re-batteried — the sensors wear out even if the beep still works. If you're short on detectors, prioritize bedrooms and the hallway outside them. Our guide to how to replace a smoke detector covers hardwired and battery units.
Test the GFCI outlets. Kitchens, bathrooms, the garage, and outdoor outlets should have GFCI protection — the outlets with the little TEST and RESET buttons. Press TEST, confirm the power cuts, press RESET. A GFCI that won't trip or won't reset is a replacement job, and it's a cheap one.
Put a fire extinguisher where fires actually start. Under the kitchen sink or mounted by the door out of the kitchen — reachable, not above the stove. Check the gauge on any extinguisher the sellers left behind; if the needle's in the red or the unit is over a decade old, replace it.
Replace the HVAC filter and write down its size. Sellers rarely leave a fresh one. Pull the old filter, note the dimensions printed on the frame (16x25x1 and 20x25x1 are common), and put in a new one with the airflow arrow pointing toward the furnace. A clogged filter makes the system work harder at everything — heating, cooling, and moving air to that one bedroom that's always stuffy.
Photograph every model and serial plate. Furnace, AC condenser, water heater, stove, fridge, washer, dryer, garage door opener. Ninety seconds with your phone. The first time anything breaks, the parts counter, the warranty line, and the repair tech will all ask for exactly these numbers, and the plates are always in the worst possible spot to read later.
Do a slow photo walkthrough of the whole house. Walls, ceilings, floors, inside the attic access if you can reach it, under every sink. Dated photos from move-in week settle arguments later — with insurers, with contractors, and with your own memory about whether that ceiling stain is new or was always there. It's the same habit that protects renters at the other end of a lease — a moving out checklist starts with dated photos too, because deposit disputes get settled by pictures, not memories.
Stock the unglamorous basics and start a house log. A flange plunger (the black kind with the extra lip, for toilets), a bucket, a flashlight that lives in one drawer, and a roll of painter's tape for labels. Then start one note on your phone: dates, filter size, paint colors, who serviced what. Future you, standing in a hardware store aisle, will be grateful.
Skipping the shutoff tour. Nobody wants to spend moving day looking at valves. Then a washing machine hose bursts in month three and the "tour" happens at full sprint, in water.
Painting before checking anything. Fresh paint is satisfying, but paint over the walls first and you'll be cutting around detectors you should have replaced and covering access panels you didn't know existed.
Throwing out the paperwork pile. The drawer of manuals, receipts, and warranty cards the sellers left is gold. It tells you the furnace's age, who installed the roof, and which windows carry a transferable warranty. File it, don't bin it.
Assuming the inspection covered it. A home inspection is a snapshot, not a guarantee. The home safety inspection checklist is a good second pass once the boxes are unpacked — most of its 20 items pair with things you've already touched this week.
Week one isn't about projects. It's about control: you can stop the water, kill the power, secure the doors, and prove what everything is. The locks, detectors, filters, and photos above take an afternoon all-in. After that, the house is yours in the practical sense — and you can start on the first-time homeowner tool kit and the fun list with a clear head.
Change the locks and find the shutoffs — in whichever order your day allows. Security first because strangers may have keys; shutoffs first because water damage doesn't wait. Both jobs fit in the first afternoon, before any decorating.
Rekeying is usually the better buy. A locksmith re-pins your existing locks to a new key for less than the cost of new hardware, and you keep locks that already fit the doors. Replace instead if the hardware is worn, sticky, or you want a different style anyway.
Most often in the basement or crawl space on the wall facing the street, right where the supply line enters. In slab homes it's frequently in a utility closet or the garage. There's also a shutoff at the street meter, but that one's usually the city's side of the line — start inside.
Check the manufacture date stamped on the back or side of the unit. Smoke alarms get replaced at ten years, CO alarms at seven to ten depending on the model. No date stamp, or a date you had to squint at from the last decade? Replace it — detectors are cheap and the sensor is the part that ages.
Photos of every appliance model and serial plate, the closing paperwork, any transferable warranties, and a running log of service visits, filter sizes, and paint colors. One folder — paper or digital — beats a house-wide scavenger hunt when something breaks.