Preparing your home for hurricane season comes down to three jobs: build a storm kit, confirm your insurance covers water and wind damage, and secure the openings your house actually loses through. Do all three before the first named storm forms, not when one is on the map. The work is mostly errands and paperwork, and most of it can be finished in a couple of weekends.
The timing matters more than the shopping list. Once a storm is days away, lumber sells out, generators vanish from hardware stores, and insurers stop writing new flood policies for properties in the storm's path. To prepare, in the sense Merriam-Webster defines it, is to make ready beforehand for some purpose — and the purpose here is a house that can ride out a bad night and reopen quickly after one.
This guide walks through the kit, the insurance call, the windows and doors, and the yard, then closes with a short checklist you can keep on the fridge. For the wider coastal calendar this fits into, our seasons coverage tracks what changes at the shore month by month.
What goes in a hurricane storm kit?
A storm kit is not a survival bunker. It is what your household needs to get through several days without power, clean water from the tap, or an open grocery store. Build it around three questions: what will you drink and eat, what will you need light and information for, and what would you grab if you had to leave.
Water and shelf-stable food come first — enough for every person and pet in the house for several days, in containers you can carry if the answer to "should we go" turns out to be yes. Add a manual can opener, because the electric one is exactly the appliance that fails when you need it. Then the light-and-information layer: flashlights with spare batteries, a phone battery pack charged before the storm, and a battery or hand-crank radio. When cell towers lose power, radio is often the only channel for official advisories and evacuation orders.
The grab layer is personal. Prescription medications, glasses, important documents in a waterproof folder, some cash in small bills, and comfort items for children or pets. Keep the whole kit in one or two bins you can find in the dark. A kit split across the garage, the hall closet, and the attic is not a kit.
Refresh it at the start of every season. Rotate out expired food and medicine, replace dead batteries, and update the documents folder. If you keep the kit current each year, the pre-season task shrinks to a ten-minute check.
Which insurance calls should you make before hurricane season?
This is the least physical task on the list and the one that saves the most money. Standard homeowners policies vary widely in what wind and water damage they cover, and flood damage is typically handled by a separate flood policy, not the main one. Call your insurer and ask three things in plain language: does my policy cover wind damage, do I have flood coverage, and how long does a new flood policy take before it takes effect.
That last question matters because new flood coverage often carries a waiting period, which means the policy you buy as a storm approaches may not protect you for that storm. Ask your carrier what the waiting period is rather than assuming. Also ask about your deductible for wind or named-storm damage, which on some coastal policies works differently from a standard dollar deductible.
While you are on the phone, document the house. Walk through every room with your phone camera on, opening drawers and closets, then photograph the roof, the garage, and any expensive items with their serial numbers. Store the video somewhere cloud-based, not on the laptop that might be in the flooded room. After a claim, a dated record of what you owned is worth more than any memory of it.
How do you prepare windows and doors for a storm?
Wind does not usually knock a house down. It finds an opening, and once one window or door fails, pressure and rain get inside and the damage multiplies. So window prep is really opening prep, and it starts with knowing your options before the season.
Permanent protection — storm shutters, impact-rated glass, reinforced garage doors — is the strongest answer and worth pricing if you own in a high-risk coastal zone. For many homes, though, the seasonal answer is temporary panels: plywood or metal panels cut to size, drilled, labeled, and stored in the garage in June, not measured for in the hours before landfall. Pre-cutting and labeling each panel "front left window," "back door light," and so on turns a two-hour scramble into a one-hour job.
Two common mistakes are worth avoiding. Taping windows does nothing meaningful against wind and creates larger shards; skip it. And a garage door is often the largest weak opening on the house — brace or shutter it with the same seriousness as the windows.
What should you do in the yard and around the house?
Walk your property the way a strong gust would. Anything light enough to lift is a projectile: patio furniture, planters, grills, trash cans, toys, propane tanks. The plan is not to hope the wind misses them; it is to have a place for all of it — a shed, a garage bay, or indoor space cleared in advance. Propane tanks should be secured upright outdoors, never brought inside.
Trees need attention on a longer clock. Dead limbs and overhanging branches above the roof or power line to the house should be trimmed well before storm season, ideally by a professional when the work is above head height. A tree service booked in the calm months is cheaper and easier to schedule than one booked after a warning.
Then handle the water. Clear gutters and downspouts so rain can move off the roof, and check that drainage around the house runs away from the foundation, not toward it. If your area floods, know whether your sump pump works and whether you have a battery backup for it. Inside, decide in advance which valuables go upstairs or onto high shelves if water threatens — the decision is easy to make now and hard to make at midnight.
What this means: a weekend-by-weekend plan
Our analysis of the work splits it cleanly. Weekend one: build and refresh the kit, and photograph the house for insurance records. Weekend two: make the insurance calls, then measure, cut, and label window panels. An evening after that: the yard walk, gutter clearing, and the tree check. Spread over a few weeks, none of it feels heavy — and none of it depends on a forecast.
Keep a one-page checklist on the refrigerator: kit locations, insurer phone numbers, policy numbers, the panel labels, and the yard list. When a watch is actually issued, you will not be reading a guide like this one. You will be checking boxes. And when the season ends, our Fall on the Coast: Why Autumn Is the Shore's Secret Season piece is a good reminder of why the prepared house gets to enjoy the quiet months that follow.
The closing takeaway
Hurricane season preparation is mostly about removing decisions from the worst day of the year. The kit means you are not competing for batteries at the last minute. The insurance call means a claim is a conversation with evidence, not a dispute. The labeled panels and the cleared yard mean the house itself is ready before the forecast cone appears. Do the work early, verify the details with your insurer and local emergency management office, and recheck the kit every season — because conditions change, and the official advisories before, during, and after any storm always come from your local authorities, not from a checklist. This connects to our earlier piece, Memorial Day at the Beach: How the Season's First Big Weekend Actually Works.
