When you’ve bought a house, it is tempting to imagine the hard work is done and the nastiest costs are behind you. However, it is essential to keep on top of property maintenance in order to keep your house safe, usable, and a pleasant environment to live in.
Unfortunately, the cost of this maintenance can often be steep as repair and renovation bills mount up. It is a hidden cost, especially as you’re never quite sure what maintenance will need to be done, leaving accurate budgeting difficult.
Despite this, there are a number of simple principles you can follow in order to keep on top of house maintenance and spiraling costs. It just requires forward planning and regular upkeep.
Here’s how to maintain your house without breaking the bank:
Large repairs are inevitable, so invest in quality upfront
There’s no getting around the fact that some maintenance bills will be steep. This is part of property ownership and shouldn’t be avoided. On the contrary, by embracing these costs, you stand the best chance of saving money in the long term.
This may sound illogical, but it stands to reason that if you invest in quality upfront, you will reap the rewards later on. For instance, if your house requires a roof repair or replacement, it can be tempting to either ignore the problem until it gets worse, attempt to fix it yourself or hire a low-grade roofer to patch it up.
Any of these options will no doubt take the financial sting out of the tail, but they store up the potential for further trouble – and costs – later on. To continue with the roof analogy, if you let it get worse, dampness could spread into your home, or worse, water can seep through the ceiling. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out this means eye-watering bills, so be brave and tackle the initial problem head-on.
In this case, hiring a specialist like Signature Roofing Company will significantly reduce the risk of further costs in the medium and long term.
Your home may not need a significant renovation – if in doubt, paint
If you are growing tired of the way your house looks, or it is looking tired itself, then you could be tempted to rip it apart and complete a comprehensive renovation.
While there’s nothing wrong with this – and if vital structural work needs doing, then, by all means, address it – this approach can lead to hefty bills. If it is simply an aesthetics issue, you could instead experiment with new paint colors, patch up any scruffy-looking details and invest in some different furniture.
This will save you considerable amounts of money best saved for a rainier day, give you a satisfying and therapeutic activity to work on, and help you spot any underlying structural problems when you’re up-close painting, sanding, and restoring furniture.
Set a designated day to house maintenance
The best way to keep on top of house maintenance costs is to prevent little problems from becoming large ones. To do this, you will need to regularly be on the lookout for issues and stop your house from becoming neglected.
A great method for maintaining this level of discipline is to designate a certain time every week (or month at very least) to house maintenance. By doing this, you have no excuse for forgetting to do it.
The good news is that as long as you keep up regular checks, the work shouldn’t take long, all being well.
Replace tired furniture with renovated second-hand items
If your furniture is starting to become old and tired-looking, it may be time to replace it.
There is nothing wrong with buying new items to replace the old furniture, but a cost-effective alternative could be to find quality used items.
This does not mean that you should buy even older and more tired-looking furniture, because that defeats the point. However, there is a huge amount of immaculate, high-quality (and even designer) furniture on internet stores like Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree.
These items are usually listed for a fraction of the cost of a new piece of furniture and can save you considerable amounts of money while drastically improving the appearance of your home.
Focus on the areas that are used the most
When you only have so much money maintaining your house, it can be tricky to allocate money to the right areas.
A practical method for approaching it is to focus on the areas you spend the most time in – and therefore require the most urgent attention. This may require you to sacrifice the guest bedroom for the kitchen in the short term, for example, but it will save you considerable amounts of money and effort.
Often it is key details that make your house look tired
A trick to maintaining your house without breaking the bank is to resist the temptation to keep everything pristine and brand new and instead make sure the key details that matter are taken care of.
These key details include appliances (which you use, and therefore notice every day), taps, toilets, door handles, and the kitchen work surface. Essentially, all the most frequent touchpoints in your home. Keeping these details up to date and clean will give the overall impression that your house is immaculate, even if you can’t afford to keep it that way all the time.
If you have a garden, make it as manageable as possible
These maintenance principles can extend to your garden maintenance if need be. It is actually even more important to use the ‘little but often’ approach to maintaining your garden because it can literally grow out of hand without your input.
Letting the grass grow long and weeds consume your plants will only make your job harder when it comes to gardening, so regularly cutting the grass and weeding can make your overall workload far easier and give your property a neater appearance.