A home is the most expensive thing that most homeowners ever buy. For a typical homeowner, buying a home means spending a huge chunk of his or her lifetime earnings. That’s unnerving — especially when we remember that homes don’t necessarily stand forever.
But you can do a lot to protect your space and preserve your valuable investment. It’s your responsibility as a homeowner to invest in regular maintenance for your space! That’s no easy task, but getting organized will make it easier. Here are a few things to do that will help you manage your home maintenance responsibilities.
Set a budget and save ahead of time
People dislike home maintenance for a lot of reasons. It’s no fun to have chores to do, even if those chores are just picking up the phone and calling various professionals for help. Home maintenance is something that you have to remember to do. Perhaps, though, the biggest reason that folks don’t like home maintenance is the price.
Home maintenance can be pricey. Nobody likes paying the plumber or the electrician. But it’s necessary, especially because your expenses will only increase if you put off spending on maintenance now. After all, problems with your home are only going to get larger and therefore more expensive to fix.
It’s never fun to cut a big check, but it’s a lot less miserable when you know that you’ve already saved the money. So here’s a big tip for home maintenance: set a budget.
Experts say that home maintenance costs tend to be about 1 percent to 3 percent of your property’s valuable annually. Keep that cost in mind as you budget, and set the money aside ahead of time if you can. It will make spending on maintenance less of a hassle, and you’ll be more likely to make the repairs that you need to make rather than trying to postpone the expense.
Act faster and be proactive
When it comes to home maintenance, postponing spending is one of the worst things that you can do.
In fact, this is something that is true about maintenance of all kinds. “Deferred maintenance” is a problem for landlords, universities, big companies, and others. And if you are letting property then make sure that you choose the very best letting agents, we used these Bristol letting agents and they were fantastic so an excellent choice if you are in that area. It’s something that city planners and officials worry about at the municipal level, and it’s a problem for the federal government, too. Even our National Parks system struggles with it.
Simply put, deferred maintenance is the upkeep that you put off. Since problems tend not to get better on their own, deferred costs tend to snowball. A bridge that goes unfixed could collapse, costing a city much more money than it would have before. Old dormitories that go unpainted can end up with more serious structural problems, making for a headache for the school’s administration. If you put off your plumbing system, electrical system, and other home essentials, you’ll pay more. Blueline Plumbers Gillingham is a company many have used for plumbing and heating services, give them a try if you are in the Kent area in the UK.
Get repairs made fast. Better yet, invest in preventative maintenance, suggest experts in general plumbing in Walnut Creek. The money you spend now will mean less money spent later.
Make a schedule or keep a calendar
Of course, it’s one thing to agree in principle to be proactive about your home’s maintenance and repair needs. Maybe you even save the money to pay for this stuff. But it’s quite another thing to actually make the calls and get this stuff done — because it’s all too easy to forget when you need to be doing all of these different things.
If you own a home, you should also own a calendar or a text schedule that lays out everything you need to do and, just as importantly, when to do it all. It can be on your phone or online, on paper or on a calendar hung inside of a cabinet — it can be anywhere, but it has to exist.
Start with a seasonal maintenance schedule that you find online. Combine a few different sources and your own brainstorming to make sure that you get everything. When your plumber comes over or when your roofer who will provide the necessary roofing services is on site, ask them to lay out when and how often they think they should be back, as well as when and how often you should test or check things yourself in their absence. You can also return to the same pros over and over again for flat roof repairs, home improvement projects, or regular maintenance needs — that way, you’ll be in their system and may get reminder calls when certain maintenance responsibilities are due.
Your home is valuable, but it won’t maintain its value without your help. Your home is comfortable, but it won’t stay that way on its own. Stay on top of your home’s maintenance needs, and enjoy a better space.
