Home Maintenance

While the economy is weak, it is important to make sure that maintenance costs are included in budgeting along with the mortgage payment. Homeowners should budget between one and three percent of the cost of the home for ongoing maintenance, depending on the age and condition of the home when it was purchased and the homeowners’ capability to take on some of the jobs themselves.

Maintaining clean gutters and downspouts is something that most homeowners can do themselves, and keeping up with this important maintenance can prevent costly water damage to your house. In addition to making sure that the gutters and downspouts are clean of any debris and water can flow freely, the homeowner needs to make sure that water flows away from the house when it clears the downspout.

The outside of a house needs to be repainted every 5 to 10 years, but taking care to scrape any peeling paint and touching up paint can maintain the outside appearance of the home and delay the cost of exterior paint for as long as possible. Maintaining exterior paint not only helps with the home’s appearance but also protects the house from weather damage, and protecting surfaces will make painting easier and less expensive when the complete job is needed. Several estimating programs exist online to estimate the cost of painting the exterior of your home, but expect to pay one to several thousand dollars depending on the size, the painted surfaces, and the condition of your house.

Interior paint should be maintained so that surfaces are covered with a clean coat of paint. Touch-ups can keep interior surfaces protected for some time. The cost of maintaining interior paint projects can be as low as $30-100 depending on the size of the project.

Smoke detector maintenance is another easy maintenance chore for the homeowner. Batteries should be replaced and the detector tested at least yearly. Battery cost is approximately $3-5 and whole unit replacement less than $50 if the device has failed.

Chimney cleaning is something that should be done by a chimney professional and can range from 50 to several hundred dollars depending on your local pricing, the condition of your chimney, and access to your chimney. This maintenance will get rid of the creosote that coats the chimney walls as the result of burning wood and creates a fire hazard if allowed to accumulate.

Foundations should be checked for cracks and repaired before the cracks expand to a big-ticket repair. Minor cracks can be repaired for a few hundred dollars but major repairs can run to tens of thousands of dollars.

Big-ticket items like furnace, roof, and air conditioning also need to be budgeted. Maintenance of these items will postpone the big expenditure for as long as possible. Delay of maintenance can promote issues and failure of these resulting in an unplanned emergency expenditure that is often more expensive that if it was planned. Since any of these big-ticket items can cost $2,000-10,000 to replace, it is important to keep up on maintenance.

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