So you’ve bought a house for the first time – it’s an exciting time in your life! Owning property can feel very freeing after running everything by a landlord in the past. However, the new privileges and freedoms come with new responsibilities, including upkeep and maintenance on the property. Maybe you’ve owned before, but when you sold your home and bought this one, it came with an uptick in needed maintenance, such as a larger home or a fixer-upper.
Even if you aren’t a particularly handy person, it really pays off down the road if you do some basic maintenance tasks for your home periodically. Homelight gathered insights from top agents who recommend some easy, clear ways to make your home’s various parts stay functional and beautiful such as cleaning your window blinds, which helps sustain the value of the home over time.
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Visual Inspection Of The Outside Of The House
It sounds silly if you haven’t done it before, but because your house is protecting you all the time, you have to check it occasionally for damage. If everyone is out of the house when a branch falls and breaks off shingles and damages the siding, you might not notice. Replacing shingles and fixing siding are fairly small repairs that don’t cost all that much, but fixing major water damage when you have water leaks can be a very hefty bill.
Prevent it by knowing what your house looks like. If you think you’ll forget whether a cosmetic bit of damage has gotten worse, take pictures of the roof, exterior of the house, and foundation. Small fissures in the foundation are a sign of the foundation settling and can lead to water in your basement or bottom floor, so noticing and filling them when they are small is, again, a form of less-expensive prevention instead of very expensive cure.
Get HVAC Systems Inspected
You might feel strange paying a small service fee when you don’t suspect anything is wrong with your furnace or air conditioner, but these systems are temperamental and deserve some attention. Getting a yearly furnace inspection in the fall, especially if your furnace is older than average, can really extend its life. If the furnace inspector discovers a small needed repair, they may be able to fix it before it causes cascading damage to other parts of the system.
Not every area of the United States uses these systems heavily, so you might be able to do inspections once every two years if you live in a very temperate area, but you’ll save a lot over time if your furnace can last for a full 20-25 years rather than catastrophically failing at 12 years old for lack of prevention.
Keep Those Beds Mulched
Outside, you’ve made your garden and yard look nice, but the cold is coming. What’s the best way to protect the delicate roots of any perennials from the winter? Mulch! Choose the right type of mulch for the plants you have with the help of a garden center employee, and put a layer down to help trap in warmth for those very cold days and nights. In the spring, the mulch will do double duty because mulch also deters weeds quite well.