Owning a home can bring immense joy. It’s a happy place where family and friends gather to create memories. A retreat that brings comfort and security. But maintaining a home requires significant investment of your time, energy, and money. It can get overwhelming thinking about ALL that goes into maintaining a home, especially if you are a new homeowner. But it can be a bit easier if you divide that looong list of tasks into these 5 different types of home maintenance.
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Why Should You Care About Home Maintenance?
In a nutshell, having your ducks in a row when it comes to home maintenance – from understanding its benefits, to knowing what tasks need to be done (and when), to budgeting for future repairs – makes for a happier homeowner.
Staying on top of home maintenance reduces the risk of costly emergencies, lowers stress and minimizes frustration. It allows you to enjoy your home – isn’t that what we all want?
Taking some time to understand what home maintenance is all about puts you in the driver seat to create that happy, safe, well-maintained abode of your dreams.
[Psst!! If you need more motivation, check out these 11 Benefits of Home Maintenance.]
What is Home Maintenance?
Home maintenance means examining (and if necessary, repairing or replacing) the various components of your home. It’s checking your home’s systems (foundation, plumbing, roofing, etc.) for safety and efficiency.
In other words, home maintenance is ensuring everything in your home works the way it’s supposed to.
What Isn’t Home Maintenance?
Home maintenance’s goal is to keep your home safe and running smoothly. It DOES NOT refer to the general, everyday tasks like cleaning and organizing.
- Cleaning the bathroom? NOT home maintenance.
- Checking under the bathroom sink for leaks? Home maintenance.
Make sense?
5 Types of Home Maintenance
Home maintenance can be broken down into these 5 different buckets:
- Routine Maintenance
- Project Maintenance
- Corrective Maintenance
- Emergency Maintenance
- Lifestyle Maintenance
Some of these types of home maintenance – such as routine and project – are preventative. This requires proactive repair or replacement to avoid most costly, more extensive work in the future. Other types of home maintenance – such as corrective and emergency – are more reactive in nature. Building components have already been broken, and a fix is required.
1. Routine Maintenance
This first of 5 types of home maintenance (sometimes also called preventative maintenance) applies to a set of tasks planned ahead of time.
The goal of preventative maintenance is to proactively keep up your home and prevent more costly problems in the future. These are all the little things that keep your home running smoothly. And just as importantly, prevent bigger issues down the road.
We’re talking about things like:
- Changing HVAC filters
- Checking smoke and carbon monoxide detectors
- Clearing gutters
- Practicing family emergency plans
- Cleaning dryer vent
These home maintenance tasks usually need to be done at least once a year. Luckily many of these tasks are DIY, are relatively inexpensive and don’t take a significant amount of time.
Challenges: One of the biggest challenges of routine home maintenance is remembering to actually do it. It’s easy to let those home maintenance tasks slip through the cracks. The best way to solve that? Scheduling it.
Avoid the “Oops, I forgot again.”
Scheduling routine home maintenance can be as simple as a notebook or Home Maintenance Binder pdf. Or your Google calendar. For others who embrace the wonders of technology, there are some fantastic digital tools and apps out there that can become your virtual maintenance assistants.
Pick a time that is most convenient for you. Many homeowners find setting aside a weekend a quarter (i.e. every season) to tackle home maintenance chores is sufficient to get everything done. But if your home needs more TLC, consider a weekend per month.
Checklists: To keep yourself organized, create or download a checklist of the recurring maintenance tasks. Quarterly/ seasonal maintenance checklists are great ways to ensure you don’t overlook any tasks.
Unique Needs: Everyone’s house is unique and therefore, has different needs. So, while many of the basic tasks (i.e. replace roof, ) are similar, my list of home maintenance will differ from yours.
For example, your routine home maintenance plan should be customized based on your region and weather patterns. Come fall, my fellow New Englanders need to think about winterizing pipes, while the Southeast needs a prep for hurricane season.
DIY to Save $$: The good news is that you can do most routine home maintenance on your own without much experience. YouTube and Google are your best friends.
But it you are uncomfortable with doing your own home maintenance (or just don’t have the time and energy) find a reliable handyman. Schedule them to visit a minimum of once or twice a year to work on your house.
2. Project Home Maintenance
Not all home maintenance tasks need to be addressed as frequently as every year. Many of your home’s components have a “shelf life” or lifespan. For example, most roofs only last 30 years, while appliances last 10-20 years. This type of home maintenance focuses on replacing or repairing the various components of your home.
I think of this replacement or restoration of these various components as small “projects”. Examples include:
- Appliance replacements
- Roof repairs or replacements
- Fresh coats of paint
- Window restoration
- Updating bathroom and kitchen fixtures
Scheduling: Tasks that fall under project home maintenance are bigger in scope and occur every few years or even decades, so it’s important to plan ahead and be prepared.
For these projects, you shouldn’t wait until they completely break or fail. If that happens, you end up with emergency home maintenance, and that usually ends up being more expensive (and more stressful). Project home maintenance is proactive -update or replace the home system before it fails.
Budgeting blues: Projects like these can put a dent in your wallet, so it’s essential to factor them into your financial plans. Rule of thumb recommends that homeowners set aside 1 to 2% of their home’s value each year for these types of maintenance and upgrades. Start saving up and exploring your options well in advance.
Prioritize & Conquer: Not all projects need to happen simultaneously. For example, we bought a new furnace our first year, replaced our new roof two years later, then exterior paint two years after that. Take a deep breath and prioritize based on urgency and importance. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?
3. Corrective Maintenance
For this type of home maintenance, damage has been done to a home component due BUT its repairing is not an immediate need. It’s not an emergency but more of an issue of decreased comfort or inconvenience in your home.
Here we are talking about:
- Burnt-out light bulbs
- Broken ceiling fans
- Sticky doorknobs
- Broken stair baluster
HOWEVER, that being said, this type of home maintenance shouldn’t be put off indefinitely. If not addressed within a reasonable amount of time, these low-priority tasks can eventually lead to a more serious situation.
The best way to address corrective maintenance is by adding to your next routing maintenance checklist.
4. Emergency Maintenance
This is a homeowner’s least favorite type of home maintenance. This is the unfortunate occurrence of a home component breaking, requiring it to be immediately addressed and fixed.
I hope these examples never happen to you:
- Broken furnace during winter
- Cracked sewer pipe
- Gas leak
- Flooded basement
- Power blackout
Emergency maintenance is not only costly, but can even post a health risk to occupants. You may need to find shelter elsewhere while your home is fixed.
And while most preventative maintenance can be DIYed, emergency maintenance is more likely to require the services of a licensed expert.
5. Lifestyle Home Maintenance
As you journey through life, your goals and priorities may change. Lifestyle home maintenance is about adapting your home to the ebb and flow of your life. It’s about making adjustments that reflect your changing circumstances and ensure your home continues to be a place of comfort and functionality.
Sometimes these adjustments are small. But more commonly, lifestyle home maintenance tasks require large, complex projects.
Examples of lifestyle home maintenance include a wide range of major life transitions, such as:
- Selling or Buying a House
- In-law suits for older family
- Aging-in-place for seniors/ adaptive living
- Adult children moving back home
- Home office
- Growing families
- Hosting family events like graduation, wedding, etc.
There are many reasons to celebrate these lifestyle changes – a new job that allows for remote work (but you need a home office), family members coming to live with you, new babies on the way.
But these events do come with some stressors. For example, selling your house is a stressful experience. But you can minimize the frustration and ensure a smooth process by addressing obvious home maintenance issues before putting it on the market. Don’t have a lot of time? Rely on a realtor or home inspector to prioritize which maintenance tasks have the greater potential to positively (or negatively) impact its selling price.
Budgeting Woes: Like project home maintenance, creating space that accommodates your evolving needs can cost a pretty penny. Be sure to have the right financial mechanisms in place to cover the expenses (both expected and unexpected) that require project completion.
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Speaking of HVAC filters, we recommend doing this at least every 90 days. But you may find you need to check it more frequently during times of high use, like the summer or winter.
Quite right! Thanks so much for reading and reaching out!