How to Prepare Your House for a Hurricane in Texas

How to prepare your house for a hurricane: the checklist

Work the list in order of what actually fails first in a Gulf Coast storm.

Openings first. Wind that gets inside a house pressurizes it and pushes the roof and walls out from within — most catastrophic failures start with a broken window or a failed garage door, not the roof itself. So the priority is covering windows and bracing the garage door.

Then the roof-to-wall connection, which is what hurricane straps address.

Then everything loose outside — furniture, grills, planters, trampolines, fence sections — which become projectiles at hurricane wind speeds.

Then water: make sure gutters, downspouts, and drainage carry water away from the foundation, and know where your low openings are. A hurricane preparation checklist for Houston is really this: openings, structure, projectiles, water — in that order.

How to board up windows for a hurricane

Windows are the most common failure point, and there are two good answers.

Plywood window covers: the proven low-cost option. Use 5/8-inch or thicker exterior-grade plywood, cut to overlap the window opening by several inches on each side, and anchor it into the wall framing or into anchors set in the surrounding wall — not taped or nailed loosely to the trim, which does nothing. The time to measure, cut, label, and pre-drill panels for every window is now, calmly, not in the checkout line the day before landfall. We cut and label plywood window covers to your openings so they're ready to go up fast.

Hurricane shutters: the permanent, faster-to-deploy option — roll-down, accordion, or panel shutters that mount to the house and close in minutes. Hurricane shutter installation costs more up front and pays it back in not scrambling for plywood every warning. Tape on the glass, for the record, does nothing but make a mess — skip it.

How to protect a garage door from a hurricane

The garage door is the largest opening on most houses and the one most likely to fail — it's a big, flexible panel, and once wind pushes it in, the storm is inside the house and working on the roof from below.

Garage-door bracing is the fix. Vertical bracing kits reinforce the door against the wind load so it doesn't bow and blow in, and they go on ahead of the storm. Some newer doors are wind-rated; most older Houston garage doors are not, and bracing is what closes that gap. We install garage-door bracing so the biggest opening on the house isn't the weakest point. Protecting the garage door is, for a lot of homes, the single highest-value thing on the whole list.

How to secure a fence, patio, pergola, and outdoor furniture

Everything the wind can lift or tear loose is both a projectile and a loss.

Fences: a solid fence acts like a sail. You generally don't take a fence down before a storm, but loose or rotten sections and posts are what go first and then fly — so the real prep is keeping the fence sound, and we reinforce weak posts and sections ahead of season. If a gate can be taken off and stored, do it.

Patios and pergolas: anything not permanently anchored — shade sails, loose-set covers, freestanding structures — should be taken down or secured. A properly built and anchored pergola is designed to stay; a loose one becomes debris.

Outdoor furniture: bring it inside, into the garage, or into a shed. What can't come in should be clustered and tied down low, or sunk in a pool if you have one. Umbrellas, cushions, grills, and planters are the classic missiles — get them out of the wind.

Hurricane straps and roof-to-wall tie-downs

The roof is held on by the connection between the rafters or trusses and the walls, and in a lot of older Houston homes that connection is just nails. Uplift from hurricane wind is exactly the force that pulls those apart.

Hurricane straps — galvanized metal connectors, sometimes called hurricane clips or ties — physically tie the roof structure to the wall framing so the roof stays put under uplift. On homes with accessible framing they can be added in the attic ahead of season. Installing hurricane straps is one of the higher-value structural upgrades for a Gulf Coast home, because the roof staying on is what keeps everything under it dry. We install hurricane straps where the framing allows access.

Storm-prep work we install and build

Most of this list is worth doing once, properly, before the season rather than scrambling each warning. What we install and build across Houston:

Hurricane shutters and cut-to-fit, labeled plywood window covers, anchored to the framing.

Garage-door bracing sized to the door.

Hurricane straps and roof-to-wall tie-downs where framing is accessible.

Fence reinforcement — resetting and strengthening weak posts and sections before the wind finds them.

Generator pads: we pour the level concrete pad a standby generator sits on. To be clear about scope, that's the pad only — we don't provide, place, or connect the generator, and no electrical or gas hookup is part of our work. Those are a separate scope handled on their own.