Published 27 July 2026
If your property backs onto bushland or sits below the escarpment, the maintenance you do before summer isn’t really maintenance. Most homes lost in a bushfire are lost to ember attack, not to a wall of flame arriving — embers travelling ahead of a fire, landing in a gutter full of dry leaf, under a deck, or in a pile of garden waste against the house.
That’s the good news, in a sense: the things that matter most are ordinary jobs, they’re cheap, and they’re entirely within your control.
Start here, not with this page: the NSW Rural Fire Service’s Bush Fire Survival Plan is the authority on what to do and when to leave. Nothing below replaces it. This guide is about the physical property work — the part we do — and how to sequence it.
The single highest-value job: gutters
A gutter full of dry eucalypt leaf is the most reliable way for an ember to start a fire on your roof. The RFS is explicit that removing litter from the roof, valleys and gutters ahead of the season is a basic part of preparing a property.
What this actually means in the lower mountains:
- Roof valleys as well as gutters. Valleys collect deeply and are the bit that gets skipped, because you can’t see them from the ground.
- Twice a year, not once. Glenbrook, Blaxland, Springwood, Emu Heights and Regentville all get heavier leaf fall than the Sydney average. An annual clean is not enough when the canopy is over the roofline.
- Timing: clear it before the season, and again after the main autumn drop. The pre-summer clean is the one that counts.
- Gutter guard is not a fix. It reduces how often you clean; it doesn’t remove the need. Guard with fine debris sitting on top of it can hold more fuel than an open gutter.
We photograph what comes out of a gutter. On bush blocks that photo is usually the thing that convinces someone it needed doing.
The zone around the house
Embers land where fuel is. The aim is to make the ground immediately around the building boring.
Within a few metres of the house:
- Firewood stacks — move them well away, not against the wall
- Garden waste piles, prunings, that heap behind the shed
- Mulch beds hard against the wall, especially fine bark
- Furniture cushions, doormats, anything on a deck that catches an ember
- Under the deck — this collects leaf constantly and nobody looks
Further out:
- Long grass cut back
- Dead material out of shrubs and hedges — the dead stuff inside a plant burns readily
- Branches overhanging the roof
- Fine fuel raked up and removed rather than piled at the boundary
If your property has a designated Asset Protection Zone, maintaining it is the specific thing it exists for. The RFS Blue Mountains District Office can advise on your block.
The gaps embers get through
Worth walking around and looking for once:
- Gaps under roof tiles or ridge capping where a bird or a storm has lifted something
- Damaged or missing fascia and eaves — an open eave is a direct route into the roof cavity
- Gaps under the house and around subfloor vents
- Damaged flyscreens — metal screens on windows are genuinely protective, and a torn one isn’t
- Weatherboard gaps and split timber
- Deck boards with wide gaps over an area that collects leaf underneath
Most of these are small repairs — a fascia section, a screen, some capping. They’re exactly the sort of item that sits on a list for two years because none of them individually justifies calling someone. Batched into one visit, they’re a morning.
Access, for the people who might come
Two things that matter and get overlooked:
- Can a fire truck get in? Overgrown driveways, low branches over the drive, a gate too narrow or that doesn’t open properly. On the steep, treed blocks common in Blaxland and Emu Heights this is a real constraint.
- Is the property number visible from the road? At night, in smoke, from a moving vehicle. A faded or overgrown number is a genuine problem.
Static water supply — a tank, a pool — is useful to firefighters if they can find it and reach it. Worth knowing whether yours is accessible.
Sequence and timing
Late winter to early spring is the window. Doing this in November means competing for every contractor in the mountains and doing it in heat.
- Cut back and prune — generates the waste
- Clear the fine fuel and rake up — including under decks
- Remove the waste properly. Don’t pile it at the boundary. That pile is now the fuel load, just relocated
- Gutters and valleys last — after the pruning, so the debris that comes down is caught in the same visit
- Repairs — screens, fascia, capping, gates
- Access check — driveway clearance, visible street number
Doing gutters before the pruning is the classic mistake. You pay for it twice.
What we do out here
Gutter and valley clearing with photos of what came out, garden cut-back and dead material removal, green waste taken away rather than piled, and the small repairs — screens, fascia, capping, gates, decks — batched into one visit.
We work the steep and treed blocks that some contractors won’t quote, across Glenbrook, Blaxland, Springwood, Emu Heights, Leonay and Regentville, and out through the Penrith suburbs on the escarpment side.
Best booked late winter. If you leave it to November you’ll be waiting, and so will everyone else.
Call 0494 301 215 or tell us about your block.
This covers property maintenance work only. For bushfire survival planning, evacuation decisions, permits and hazard reduction, follow the NSW RFS and your local brigade — they’re the authority, and their advice changes with conditions.