4 Efficient Home Maintenance Tips to Avoid Costly Future Repair Expenses

Owning a house is everyone’s dream. You’ve included it in your list of goals with a set time frame. It might be the age in the late twenties or between thirties to forties that people have successfully achieved owning a home. However, when you have one, you may have noticed the high expenses you spent on home maintenance.

If you’ve been renting a house for many years, you might haven’t realized the cost of maintenance fees that you should be paying. The owner of your apartment usually has a maintenance crew. They do work in the yard, pressure-wash the exterior of the apartment, check your A/C and HVAC system, and other minor and major maintenance tasks.

When you finally have a home of your own, these tasks will be your responsibility. The expenses will also be directly coming from your pocket. Many homeowners get used to it, so they know how much money they should save for regular home maintenance. Hence, read the home maintenance tips below to avoid any enormous future repair expenses.

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The Roof

The vital part of the entire protection system of your house relies on your roof. It protects you, your family, and your possessions. When it gets replaced or repaired, you’ll surely pay a high bill that will add to your overall expenses at home. Hence, giving your roof regular maintenance will lengthen its life span and avoid any forms of damage.

You should regularly check your roof twice a year or every after season. You can personally check the condition of your roof by climbing up on a ladder. You can see if the roof starts to degenerate when some shingles are curled, or bent and some spaces are found between them. It’ll consequently cause more damages and might destroy the entire roof condition.

You should also check and clean the gutter to avoid blocking the water flow when raining. Many people don’t usually give attention to the condition of the gutter. If water stays in the gutter due to blocked drainage, it’ll accumulate rust and consequently make the material damaged. Also, it’ll produce moisture that will lead to the accumulation of algae, mold, and other dangerous fungi.

Hence, you should regularly inspect your roof. Replace any curled or loose shingles. It’ll be better to pay the expenses for the part of your roof, instead of paying the new entire house roofing. You also have to inspect the ceiling. If there’s any water stain, better replace that part to avoid decay or rot accumulation for the entire house’s entire ceiling.

Read more: Ceiling crack repair: Most common causes and their solutions

The Walls

Walls inside your house make divisions for different rooms. It also supports your roof and ceiling. It’s a part of your house that you must check from time to time to maintain its aesthetic quality and durability. However, there are a few factors that significantly contribute to the accumulated damages on your walls.

Walls made of wood tend to rot and damage after many years. It’s usually called a wood rot that undergoes a decomposition process transforming it into soil. The same thing happens to fallen logs that you’ve noticed in the forest. When a wall starts to rot, it may cause trouble to the homeowners because it can consequently result in more home structural problems.

Moreover, wood rot may also weaken the support beams and posts. It could rot the wooden floor too, and the ceiling and roof. It may damage every part of your house that’s made of wood if left unchecked and unrepaired. It may cause you money for additional future expenses that may be around tens of thousands of bucks.

If softwood damage is present in a particular wall, it’ll be better to replace it with a new one to stop the wood rot from spreading to other parts of your house. For discolored walls, as long as there’s no sign of softwood, you can still repair and use it again. Make sure to apply any wood preservatives, and you can even use a dehumidifier to ensure that it’s completely dry.

On the other hand, aside from wood rot, insects and other pests at home can also be the significant contributors of wall damage. Hence, you need to thoroughly check your house to find any trace of these pests. It could be ants, mice, cockroach, wasps, flies, and many others.

There are also some other insects that may damage walls made of wood. If you notice some at home, you better contact any pest control service provider near your area. You should fix this pests problem because these may usually cause future severe damage to your walls. Therefore, your walls are part of your house maintenance that you need to check regularly.

Read more: Knocking noise in house walls

HVAC System

HVAC is a piece of home equipment that means heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. A typical HVAC system includes equipment to increase and decrease room temperature and to provide room ventilation. Your HVAC system owns a significant portion of your monthly electricity bills. Winter and summer are the seasons of the year that your bill will usually go up.

However, there are ways to conserve electricity consumption even during the peak seasons. Having regular maintenance of your HVAC system will significantly be a great help. If you continuously disregard the need for your HVAC equipment to be fixed by an experienced technician, you may end up spending more money to buy a new entire system.

Therefore, besides less electricity consumption, regular maintenance will also avoid future technical serious problems with your HVAC system. You better include your HVAC equipment in your regular house maintenance expenses.

The Plumbing

A plumbing structure has two different systems. One system supplies freshwater in your house. Water travels in the pipes to reach upstairs, the bathrooms, kitchen, and other parts of the house where water is needed. On the other hand, another system of plumbing will take the wastewater out of your house.

It’s how the plumbing system works in every home. It also needs regular maintenance to avoid any serious damages in the future. You might ignore it because you haven’t seen any problems with the water pipes. You might think that it’s totally fine and in good working condition.

However, you might become startled one day if the pipe in your basement suddenly burst. It’s part of the plumbing system that you can’t personally see unless you go downstairs in the basement. With this being said, you’re now in the middle of chaos at home because it flooded your entire basement. Hence, you’re now in need of help from an experienced plumber to fix it.

A sudden water pipe burst is a usual problem in every household. It’s still easy to fix. Hence, don’t wait for any serious problems to occur in the most unexpected time. Starting today, put a plumbing system as part of your regular house maintenance. It’ll surely help you a lot to avoid unexpected exorbitant expenses for plumbing repairs in the future. 

Read more: Essential home plumbing maintenance tips

Takeaway

Owning a house is quite different from renting one. When you were still renting an apartment unit before, you used to get free repairs and house maintenance services from the apartment owner. However, when you bought a house of your own, you realized the expensive cost of house maintenance services.

After these helpful tips discussed above, you now know how to avoid any untimely and costly repair expenses. It’ll still be smart to spend a little amount of money today than to pay high maintenance bills in the future.

Read more: A complete guide on how much to budget for home maintenance

Written by Daniel Blake. September 17, 2020

Daniel Blake juggles his time working as a freelance writer and studying as a design student. His writing career is evident in many published articles on various websites and magazines. His forte lies in real estate, design, and tech. Daniel is also a confessed bookworm who binges on reading thrillers whenever his time permits.