Compared to renting, owning a house entails far more responsibilities. The owner is responsible for fixing any issues that arise; the landlord is not there to assist. This implies that homeowners are accountable for maintaining a home’s cleanliness. You’ve heard from your realtor, mortgage lender, and internet users alike how crucial it is to maintain your property, and there are several methods to do so. However, why is it so crucial? As a provider of house warranties, Landmark’s primary goal is to assist homeowners whose appliances and systems break down due to regular wear and tear or age. Nevertheless, our contract states that a system or appliance’s failure due to neglect is not deemed “normal wear and tear.”1. While that’s a great motivation to maintain your house, you shouldn’t just rely on a home warranty’s advantages. There exist several different rationales for the significance of house maintenance.
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Maintenance around the house saves money
First and foremost, house upkeep makes financial sense for you as the homeowner. You’re thinking, “That can’t be right,” “I devote a significant amount of my time, finances, and effort to upkeep and cleaning. How can I save money doing that?”
While it is true that maintenance requires some funding, commitment, and labor, the money you save over time is far greater than if you didn’t do maintenance. Why does this occur? Your Money: the Missing Manual states that you save around $100 in future repairs for every dollar you spend on preventative maintenance around the house. This is so that you avoid having little issues, like a filthy filter or clogged drain, get worse over time and become a bigger problem, like a burst pipe or a burned out HVAC motor. Larger issues that can arise from neglecting house maintenance are far more expensive than replacing the furnace filter once a month or so.
Home upkeep Maintains Your House’s Efficiency
The fact that upkeep is simply that—maintenance—is its worst aspect. Maintaining the functional components of your house involves doing a chore repeatedly and often. It’s similar to sweeping the kitchen floor, which requires constant attention to maintain its cleanliness around once a week. Imagine the condition of the floor if you hadn’t! Now consider how frequently you unclog your bathroom drain or clean the filter in your dishwasher. Probably not as frequently as you sweep the floor, isn’t that right? However, it’s likely that you utilize them almost as frequently as the floor.
The other areas of your house need to be cleaned and maintained in order to remain useable, just like your floor needs to be swept regularly. Your home will operate less efficiently if you don’t. Your HVAC system will use more gas or energy to cool or heat the air in your house if the furnace filter isn’t cleaned. Your refrigerator will work harder and consume more energy to keep your food cold if the evaporative coils under it aren’t cleaned. Maintaining your house keeps it operating efficiently, which lowers your utility costs and saves you money.
Home upkeep Raises the Value of Your House
A new automobile loses value the moment you drive it off the lot. The more you drive and the older the automobile becomes, the less value it has in terms of resale. For a house, this idea doesn’t apply the same way. In actuality, you may be able to raise the value of your house the longer you hold it. Naturally, the market has a larger role in property prices than your personal renovations, but you may still directly impact its worth with proper upkeep.
How does one go about doing this? The home inspection report would likely reveal that your house had several issues or prospective issues if you wanted to list it for sale tomorrow and you hadn’t maintained any of your appliances or systems. Depending on the problems your house may have, buyers may seek a discounted price or ask you to replace or fix any systems that could cause them problems down the road. In either case, the amount of money you receive from the sale of the house will be less than what it would be worth.
But if you had followed the maintenance guidelines provided by the manufacturer for your appliances and systems, the house inspector would probably identify fewer problems that you would need to fix during the inspection and you would probably end up with a higher sale price. To find out more about home improvement projects that most significantly raise the value of your house, click this link.
Naturally, you end up with greater equity in your house the more DIY home maintenance and repair tasks you do that raise its worth. See our post here for an explanation of home equity.
Home Maintenance and Warranties
Breakdowns brought on by poor maintenance are typically not covered by house insurance or warranties. If it turns out that you neglected to clear your gutters, which contributed to the flood, you would have a difficult time finding a home insurance provider that would cover flooding in your attic or roof. The same holds true for house warranties: if your HVAC system’s fan burned out due to excessive strain and you neglected to change the filters for a year, your home warranty probably wouldn’t cover the repairs or replacement. Why is system and appliance maintenance required when you have a home warranty? To maintain your appliances and systems in excellent operating order and to increase their longevity, you must do maintenance on them. The majority of home warranty providers only fix or swap out appliances and systems when the homeowner has made an effort to maintain them.
One of the nicest things about having a house warranty is that you may save thousands of dollars when your systems and appliances wear out from ageing provided you take acceptable care of them. Your outdated systems can be replaced or repaired under a home warranty for a set service call charge.