Owning a home is a great privilege and many households find that they save money in the long run by paying a mortgage rather than rent. Even better, you’re left with a significant physical asset that can be handed down to your children or act as a financial safety net.
But owning a home also comes with a lot of responsibilities, which is less fun to deal with. If you rent, a landlord is on the hook for all of the home maintenance tasks. But if you’re the homeowner, it’s on you to keep everything in good repair.
Safety First
The most important reason to keep up with your home maintenance is to make sure that your house is a safe place to live. If you were a landlord, one of your responsibilities is to keep the property habitable. If tenants were to live in a house that wasn’t properly maintained and functional, they’d be in their rights to not pay rent.
The need to keep a property habitable doesn’t go away just because you’re the one living there. You might be able to leave things a little longer, but it’s still best not to.
Habitability laws aren’t just in place for the fun of it. They’re there to make sure that your tenants are safe in their homes. If you don’t properly repair issues in your property, they don’t just go away.
In some cases, disrepair can lead to a dangerous living environment. For example, in the winter, you need a functional heating system to keep the property at a comfortable temperature. Otherwise, you risk the health of the occupants, which in this case would be your family. This is especially important if children or older people live in your home.
Some jobs are more urgent than others. For example, a poor electrical system could be a fire risk, which means that it should be fixed as soon as possible.
Protecting Your Home and Finances
One of the most common reasons people put off home maintenance is that it costs money. This is true in the short term, and it’s one of the problems with owning a home. You’re responsible for the financial cost of keeping the property repaired and maintained.
However, this short term cost is nothing compared to the potential long term savings of getting these jobs sorted as soon as possible.
Maintenance tasks never go away unless you do something about them. Urgent tasks, like the electrical issues mentioned above or a major plumbing leak, obviously need to be the priority. But other tasks that might not seem as important can still drain your finances and can cause further problems the longer they’re left.
A dripping faucet, for example, can waste gallons of water in a year. You pay for every drop of that water, and the extra costs quickly mount up.
Another home improvement/maintenance job that can easily go ignored is your doors and windows. This is such a major expense and it’s very tempting to put it off for as long as possible. But the longer you put this off, the more you end up spending in utility bills to heat a house that isn’t properly insulated. Even worse, any gaps can let water or pests into your home, which cause more issues that need to be addressed.
It’s not always possible to fix everything all at once. But it’s a good idea to check through your home and create a list of things that need to be repaired, as well as things that need to be maintained. Treat this like maintenance triage and tackle the tasks that are more urgent or that will save more money first.
As well as these repairs, think about maintenance itself. Maintenance isn’t just fixing things that are broken, it’s also about preventing these breakages in the first place. A maintenance checklist can help you keep on top of these tasks, so you don’t end up scrambling in the future to do everything at once. After all, preventative maintenance is cheaper and easier than a cure.
DIY or Hire a Professional?
When it comes to home maintenance, one common question is whether to do a task yourself or to hire a professional.
There are some obvious solutions to this, depending on the job that needs doing. Some tasks, like electrical work or major plumbing tasks like cast iron pipe repair require specialized training and equipment. This means that you need to hire a professional if you want the job done safely and correctly.
But is there a middle ground?
The short answer is yes. HIring a professional has the obvious downside of costing money. If you don’t have a lot of funds, but you do have a lot of things that need to be repaired, it makes sense that you might want to consider doing some of these jobs yourself.
Simple jobs and preventive maintenance can often be dealt with by yourself. However, this will take more time and there’s always a risk that you might do something wrong, especially as the jobs get more complicated. It’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of how to do many everyday tasks in your home.
This might include changing lightbulbs, fixing a dripping faucet, unclogging a drain, patching up paint jobs, and other things that don’t require a lot of skill or specific tools.
There are a few ways to learn more complicated home maintenance skills as well. If you have a friend or a family member who is skilled with their hands, ask them to teach you a few tricks. YouTube can be a fantastic resource if you don’t have friends or relatives who can help, because it allows you to connect with people who do have these skills and who want to teach people.
Never take on a job that you don’t think you can handle, because hiring a contractor the first time is always cheaper than hiring someone to fix a problem you caused.
Kori
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