Helpful hints to protect your investment.

After recovering from the initial exhilaration of moving into their own house, first-time homeowners can be overwhelmed suddenly by the enormous responsibility facing them -- care and maintenance of the largest investment of their lives. Yet, the responsibility of taking care of your own home shouldn't put any new homeowner into shock, maintains Kenneth Austin, chairman of HouseMaster, a national home inspection company. Some common sense, routine checks, and basic how-to skills can go a long way in helping to keep a house in tip-top shape. He offers the following guidelines:

Start outside the house. If, like most Americans, you move into your home in spring or summer, you can begin a routine maintenance check on the outside right away to discover any decay under way before damage becomes significant. The most vulnerable areas are wooden surfaces subject to frequent or constant moisture exposure or from which moisture does not drain quickly. These may include lower reaches of wood siding in contact with soil, improperly designed window and door ledges, porches and patios on which rain or snow accumulates, or siding exposed to rain gutter overflows or leaks.

A telltale sign of chronic moisture invasion in areas not obviously affected by rain or snow is blistering paint. Probe suspected areas with your screwdriver. If the wood is spongy or crumbly, you have hit a trouble spot. In addition to repairing, replacing, or repainting the spot, make sure you correct the condition that caused the deterioration in the first place.

Destructive insects. Take a periodic look around the outside of the foundation, above the soil, for termite tunnels. These are lines of mud -- about the thickness of a pen -- leading from the soil to wooden portions of the structure. In foundations of unfilled cinder or concrete block, termites often manage to use the hollow interiors as built-in tunnels, eliminating the most visible sign of their presence, so periodic probing of basement beams and other low-lying lumber in homes with such foundations is important.

Another insect to be on the lookout for is the carpenter ant, which is just as destructive as well as bolder and greedier. They eat whatever you eat and burrow into woodwork to set up their colonies. Damp wood is their ideal nesting area, making it easier to construct and expand the labyrinth of tunnels they need for their eggs and larvae.

If either insect is detected, hire a professional exterminator. The nest...