Home Care Key: Keeping Up Your Home Maintenance Schedule

Home maintenance can be fun. For instance I like gardening and my husband really likes mowing the lawn with a reel mower (to each his own). If you own a home, you need to think long-term about what maintenance needs to be done, what to prioritize, and how much each of those projects will cost.

For example, this past week we had our flat roof replaced (no picture because I don’t have a ladder to get all the way up there). It’s not something particularly fun or sexy, but it needed to be done. From a daily life point of view, renovating our kitchen or renovating our basement would have been much more fun, but there’s literally nothing more important than having a roof over your head.

When we bought our house we knew that the roof was old (the age was “unknown” in the seller disclosures), so we knew it was going to be replaced sooner rather than later. We decided at the time that a new bathroom was the most important project and started there. We’ve done a number of small projects since, all the while knowing a new roof was in our near future and budgeting as best we could.

We got quotes from two companies so we could compare materials and costs. We were pleasantly surprised that one of the companies even offered interest-free 12 month financing. After we chose our vendor scheduling took a few weeks, but the job itself only took 2 days. Now we can start planning our next project, which will hopefully be something we get to enjoy every day under the roof over our heads.

Delaying home maintenance is a slippery slope. You could easily end of putting off projects that wouldn’t have been a very big deal or been very expensive and turn them into larger more expensive projects. When you buy your home, you should take the information provided to you in the seller disclosures and by your home inspector to make a list of the all of the projects that need to be done, both large and small and then prioritize and budget for them. You should review this list yearly to keep it up to date. Doing this will keep your home in tip top shape, increase the value of your home, and save you time and money when you are preparing the sell.