“You’re lucky you haven’t had a house fire yet,” this from my go-to HVAC guy after he discovered that my dryer vent was twelve feet of flex-hose running below my kitchen into the garage. “Ten years of lint built-up in that hose.” For the uninitiated, dryer hoses should be rigid. Flexible hoses collect lint in them. Then they sag with the weight of that lint over time and, eventually, become a significant fire hazard… especially when they vent into the garage with, you know, car exhaust fumes.
Let me back up. I’ve been a real estate agent for the last eight years and a homeowner for the past five years. I was supremely confident buying my house. Although I always counsel my clients to expect surprises when they buy their first home, I was pretty sure that I was prepared for whatever surprises came my way. What would I encounter in my own home that I hadn’t seen in the hundreds of other houses I have seen? But, there is nothing more humbling than being a first-time homeowner.
The surprises come at you quickly, and they always feel serious and expensive. As both a real estate agent and a homeowner, I have discovered that the single best way to stay on top of your house and avoid catastrophic problems is by doing regular home maintenance.
I used to be a bit of an eye-roller when people (mostly my Dad) would extoll the virtue of having a consistent home maintenance schedule. But now, I understand the gravity of the situation. I learned the hard way that routine maintenance saves you buckets of money.
Here is a list of the regular maintenance that I do on my house and the events that caused me to learn the hard way:
1. Duct Cleaning
This should be done every two years, every year if you have pets, and after every renovation. Duct cleaning not only improves the air quality of your house but also they’ll do your dryer vents at the same time, and you can avoid the “ten years of lint” and “lucky you haven’t had a house fire” situation.
2. Annual Servicing
Annual service of your furnace, air conditioner and hot water tank.. I learned this was important when our on-demand hot water tank stopped giving us hot water and kept serving me an “error” message at 10 pm. After a frantic call to the same HVAC guy (he’s the best), he told me there was a clog in the condensate pipe and counselled me on how to fix it myself before he could come in the morning to do it properly. This is how I ended up, in my pyjamas, knelt beside the cat litter box in my furnace room, frantically huffing and puffing air from my lungs up a small, disgusting pipe until a large clot of something (calcium?) popped out from the other side. Do you know what could have avoided this nasty job? Regular service!
★ Thinking of taking that home maintenance to the next level? Check out:
3. Eavestrough Cleaning
I am kicking myself for not doing yearly eavestrough cleaning as I stare down a thousands-of-dollars bill to repair spalling bricks on the side of my house. We should all be cleaning our eavestroughs every year in that in-between time after all the leaves have fallen but before the first snowfall. I always thought, “what’s the worst that can happen?” Now I know. Water gets onto your house and ruins that part of your house. If you have a brick home, your bricks will start to deteriorate. Vinyl siding, you’ll get that nasty green mould growing. Wood siding, you’ll get rotten wood. Stucco, your house will peel like a bad sunburn. Annual eavestrough cleaning is so much cheaper than repairing your siding.
4. Proactive Pest Control
I grew up visiting my grandparents’ farm and watching their barn cats killing mice. So, when we spotted a mouse in our house, I had a vague notion that our cat would just take care of the situation. I was wrong, and we ended up with a full-blown mice infestation in a short amount of time. We couldn’t keep up with traps as they reproduced faster than we could catch them (gag). Many hundreds of dollars later, an exterminator came and took care of the situation for us. He could have charged me any amount of money. I felt that the mice had taken us hostage, and he was our rescuer. Now, as soon as I see evidence of a mouse outside our house, I quickly take care of the situation. We have not had another mouse in our home in a long time. In a battle against an infestation, time is your enemy.
★ For more resources for homeowners be sure to read:
- How Can Your Living Space Affect Your Mood?
- Five Tips for Homeowners From A Top Toronto Real Estate Agent
5. Slow Drains = Red Flags
A few months after moving into our home, we noticed that the drains were slow. We didn’t think much of it. I knew our waste pipe was plastic, so I wasn’t too worried that a tree root had gotten into our pipe. We moved on with our lives. Then we had a sewage back up. I know now that you always investigate slow drains. Always. We learned that the previous owners of our house had been dumping cooking fat down the drain. The plumber who came said that cooking fat had hardened “like concrete” in our drain over many years. Fortunately, this was an easy fix with an industrial-style fifty-foot plunger, but cleaning up after the sewage was another story. I now regularly check our drains. They haven’t seemed slow since, but if they do, you can believe that I’ll catch the problem before we have more sewage in our basement.
