Many houseowners make new decisions each year to determine what parts of their properties that need to be maintained or repaired. The decision must be entirely prudent, based on the availability of budget and opportunity. It can prove to be rather expensive, if we have a bad habit of having postponed maintenance. There are different levels of maintenance tasks that we need to apply at our home. As an example, we may need to have regular or emergency maintenance. The former should be quite easy to understand, which may include cleaning the pool and mowing the lawn. The cost is affordable and the task is quite easy to carry out, it is unlikely that regular maintenance tasks will need gut wrenching decisions. Emergency maintenance is obviously a different matter and it means that we need to get something fixed, ASAP. When the roof leaks, it will need to be patched until you have the opportunity to completely fix it. When you find out that mold has badly infested a hidden corner of your basement, you need to eradicate it right now.
You may also consider doing preventative maintenance. Unlike regular maintenance, it is aimed specifically to prevent the occurrence of failures and damages. The task can be more technical and a bit more difficult than regular maintenance. Many of us argue that if it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it; but our aim is to not to fix anything in the future by performing preventative maintenance. Property dilapidation often occurs due to various deferred maintenance tasks. Roof maintenance may need to be priority to ensure that our house won’t be affected by water damage. Procrastination could cause us to have roof replacement sooner than the projection. This could happen when moisture has accumulated in the structural area of our roof causing moderate to heavy water damage. We may also need to paint wood trim regularly. While wood siding and stucco can be painted every 7 years, we need to paint the wood trim every 2 or 3 years. This will prevent the trim wood from being damaged by insects and rot.
We also need to check the downspouts and gutters for complete maintenance. Blockage may occur due to the accumulation of debris and leaves, unfortunately, downspouts and gutters are the natural collection points for these garbage. The interval between maintenance sessions depend on our situations. We may hardly need to perform maintenance during spring, but we could be required to do weekly maintenance during fall to clean up the accumulating dry leaves. The downspouts and gutters should be clean once the first snow starts to fall. Obviously, our task will be much easier if we trim the tree to avoid exacerbating damages to the downspouts and gutters. Falling tree trunks and limbs can also heavily damage the roof during strong winds. In general, we need to be particularly proactive with our maintenance tasks. Postponing the maintenance task can cause overwhelming consequences in the near and far future.