Taking care of your house can be pretty expensive – it’s up there with buying a car and investing your savings into the stock market, but that doesn’t stop it being a big part of life.
You have to fork out for repairs here and there, and for renovations and remodeling as and when the need takes you. If you can improve the value of your home with a week’s worth of kitchen work, why would you wait around and miss the opportunity?
But all in all, even if you don’t like to mess around with the home you live in, and the most you’d be up to changing is the colour of the paint on the walls, your house can fall into disrepair rather quickly.
The older the house, the more likely it is to breakdown on you – sure, it’s stood for about 100 years now, but that also means it’s getting tired of standing up.
So, in the interest of making sure you’re aware of the possible dangers in your home, and what might need some attention sooner rather than later, we’ve compiled a few of the main reasons homes can get into a bad state.
Stay up to date on them, and prepare for them, for the best results from your four walls.
Your House Will Take a Beating From the Elements
Any kind of outside weather, when it hits the extreme temperatures and extreme reactions, can damage your home. When you’ve got heat and humidity, or when you’ve got freezing cold and wet outside, you should make it a habit to check the exterior of your home to see how things are holding up.
All kinds of issues can occur after a bout of weather energy, and the amount of pressure it might push down on your property. And seeing as the weather is getting more and more extreme these days, these problems are occurring a lot more frequently than before.
One of the worst things that can occur is subsidence. This is a particular problem during the dry periods of the year – if you’re built up on clay soil, or a soil type that’s similar, the soil can shrink down in size.
Now that may not sound like too much of a problem when taken at face value, but when you think about the amount of soil your foundation is set into, if it contracts all at once, your home might just start to sink down a little.
Keep an eye out for cracks in both interior and exterior walls, especially emanating from the bottom of your walls.
A lot of the time it might be minimal damage, or something that can be easily patched up with a bit of filler, but it’s important to get signs like these seen to as soon as possible, just in case something serious is taking place under the floors of your home.
Increased Demand/Pressure Can Lead to a Breakdown
More specifically, your bathroom can break down quite easily when there’s more demand for it, and there’s more pressure on its daily usage.
Say you have guests over; the more people who need to use the bathroom, the more flushes the toilet goes through, and that’s more and more water flowing down the pipes.
And if you’ve never had your pipes seen to, or you live in an old house that might still have some original piping somewhere down the line, this can lead to a burst.
It’s why your plumbing and water system needs a regular checkup. After all, the more caution you take, and the more you care you take over such a crucial room like the bathroom, the better.
If you haven’t had an inspection in a while now, or you’ve noticed your toilet isn’t flushing properly anymore, or there’s some weird smells coming out of a drain or two around the house, put away the bleach.
Instead, call out a service like mrrooter.ca/toronto to make sure there’s no severe blockages down there, and check to see if your sinkholes or plugs need to be replaced.
Sometimes it’s a poorly functioning drain plug that stops an appliance from drawing away properly – even a couple years build up of toothpaste waste can cause some real issues in terms of grime and scum.
Sometimes You Don’t Have the Money for a Repair Job
Of course, one of the main reasons a house can start to fall into disrepair is simply to do with a lack of funding on the owner’s behalf.
It can cost upwards of $500 for a plumber to come out for a repair job, and it could cost you near to and beyond $10,000 for something like a roof repair or replacement. Would you be able to come up with that kind of money at a moment’s notice?
Seeing as these are two main elements in your home that might need some seeing to sometime soon, it can be a real problem to try and save up for them.
You could also think about starting up an emergency fund, now that you have the chance and the foresight to. If you can save away a part of your regular income on a weekly or monthly basis, you’ll have a safety net ready and available in case any repairs need doing.
But how much would it take to provide something that’s suitable for home repairs like these? On a yearly basis, it’s recommended that you try to save about 1% of the base value of your home.
So if you paid about $200,000 for the home you now live in, saving about $2000 per year would be the best bet for making sure you can finance at least half of the work, if not all of it.
All in all, saving such a monumental amount of money is something a lot of us struggle with, and a lot of us turn to home solutions and internet remedies to try and sort the problem out.
And DIY Can Easily Go Wrong
And of course, DIY options can go wrong. As we mentioned above, a lot of us turn to other sources to find ways to sort out the problems in our home, especially if we see signs of disrepair creeping up over the walls.
The longer you wait to try and sort the problem, the more work you’re going to have to do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have the resources to do something right now!
The point is that you don’t, but you still need a fix, and that’s where DIY steps in. Even if you’re a beginner on the scene, it’s something you can manage, as long as you follow tutorials closely, and research the kind of work you need to do in length.
Even better, if you have a friend of a friend who could do the work for you, they’ll often be much cheaper compared to a big company. Don’t be afraid to reach out!
But if you don’t take the right time and effort to work out what it is you need to do, as well as invest in the right materials, the DIY is more than likely to go wrong.
You won’t have the right jousts to hold up that part of the ceiling, or you won’t have filled that crack in the wall strongly enough, or the paint you’ve bought is completely unsuited to the type of room you’ve used it in.
Sometimes even the right type of paint becomes a problem when it ends up all over the floor, instead of the walls because of a spill. The good news is that by using a paint spill clean up kit you can make dealing with this type of incident much faster, easier and safer too. Indeed, this is precisely the type of supply it’s smart to invest in before you begin a DIY project.
DIY fails are quite common, so you won’t be the only one to make a mistake.
However, if you’re trying to patch up a problem in the four walls of your house, it’s important to be sure that conducting the work yourself is better than having a professional step in to sort it out for you.
And make sure you take the time to stop and read up on what’s necessary here, to ensure you’re not wasting any money in the moment, as well as little to no money in the near future too.
Can You Take Care Of Your House?
Of course, it’s always going to be a challenge to keep up with all of the repair needs and maintenance costs. Owning a home is one of the most expensive things you can in the modern day and age, and having to pay off a mortgage at the same time as saving up as much as you can is next to impossible.
But it is possible, and that’s important to remember.
You own a home, you’re managing to keep up with the repayments on it, and now you’ve got a chance to sit down and sort your budget out. Sometimes your savings account is the most important factor of all, and being able to prioritise it for a while will save your house in the long run.
There’s a lot of work that could be done one day, so keep that in mind before putting that paycheck away elsewhere.
When you are trying to ensure you are looking after your home there are plenty of ways you can improve your home, and this is something that you need to make the most of as much as possible.
Try to do your best to help ensure you assess the areas of the home that need to be dealt with, and this is something that you need to plan and prepare for as much as possible.
Try to make sure you think about some of the key things that you should be doing to help you improve the different areas of the property, such as getting aluminum gutters, cleaning and repairing the outside of the home, fixing some of the most important elements of the property, and being able to take care of the home as effectively as possible.
This is something that can have a massive impact on the property, and this is going to have a massive impact on the way in which your property looks.
Overlooking the small things makes it simple for the property to start to fall into disrepair, and this is something that you need to work on when you want to make the most of your home.
It is vital to make the most of this moving forward, and this is something that you have to keep in mind right now.