The importance of MAINTAINING YOUR HOME
IT MAY SEEM DAUNTING, BUT IT COULD ACTUALLY SAVE YOU MONEY LATER ON
At 62 years of age, one thing I have learnt about life is if you don’t make time for wellness, you will be forced to make time for sickness. When it comes to home maintenance, the same can be said. If you don’t schedule time and a budget for home maintenance, you will be faced with stinging inflated costs, inconvenient emergency repairs and enormous stress later on.
A good rule for a maintenance budget is to calculate that five to seven per cent of the value of your home will be spent on maintenance over a 10-year period. So, if your home cost $750,000, you can expect and should schedule in between $3750-$5250 per year for maintenance, depending on the age of your home.
This should cover everything from repainting to replacing gutters, repairing and replacing your essential white goods, and service items, like a hot water unit.
As a builder that has carried out literally millions of dollars worth of repair work, much of this could have been prevented if basic maintenance and inspections had been carried out.
Simply opening up the crawl space door in the subfloor or manhole in the ceiling and using a good torch and your sense of smell, may spot a leaking stormwater pipe or bring early attention to the fact that the silicon around your bath has lost its integrity.
Another interesting phenomenon with maintenance is ‘begrudge spending’. When we are spending on items like replacing a hot water system or a fridge (two of the most begrudged household item spends), we have a sense that we deserve these items so we shouldn’t have to pay for them. This is why a conscious commitment to your maintenance as part of your budget can make life a lot easier and cheaper.
The great thing about maintaining your home is that research and timing is free, and if you are prepared to find that seven-star fridge and get it when it’s on sale rather than waiting till the day your old one takes its last breath, you will save money.