Home Improvement

Your Quick Home Maintenance Checklist

Story Highlights
  • Regular maintenance
  • Yearly maintenance
  • Winter maintenance
  • Summer, Spring and Fall maintenance
  • Once-per-decade maintenance tasks

Being a tenant and living in the rental property can often be seen as a major nuisance.

After all, you get to pay the rent month-in and month-out, and you never actually end up owning the place. Other than this, your landlord can decide to vacate you to move in, repurpose it, sell it, or find a new tenant.

However, as a tenant, you have no responsibility to tend to the maintenance of the place. This responsibility falls on the landlord instead.

As a homeowner, nonetheless, this is one of your many responsibilities. Now, while there are some who dread this idea, the thing is that it’s more than worth it.

With this relatively short home maintenance checklist on your side, tending to this can be a lot easier. Here are some tasks that you should add to your checklist:

Regular maintenance

The first thing on your checklist needs to consist of tasks that you need to perform every month.

We’re talking about testing your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, your electricity and your plumbing.

Keep in mind that you can easily handle these inspections on your own, but it’s also smart to have a local specialist who can fix these issues if anything goes afoot. For instance, it would be wise for you to find local plumbers to help you out.

Yearly maintenance

The second item on this list is maintenance tasks that need to be performed on an annual basis or even less frequently than that (2-to-5 years in some scenarios).

For instance, one of the first things you need to start looking for is the sign of termites, seeing as how this can compromise the structural integrity of your home and wooden furniture.

Second, you might want to consider cleaning a septic tank and lubricating garage door springs. Every couple of years, you should clean heat ducts and replace caulking around windows and doors.

Winter maintenance

The next thing worth mentioning is the fact that the frequency of maintenance varies from task to task.

So, for instance, you have some tasks that you need to tend to depend on the season.

For example, due to the fact that the energy-efficiency of your home is particularly vulnerable during the Winter hours, identifying and sealing draft holes is particularly essential. Winterizing your outdoor plumbing is also quite substantial, and so is covering your outdoor AC unit.

Summer, Spring and Fall maintenance

As far as the rest of the seasonal maintenance goes, during the Spring, you need to tend to the roof inspection and check your gutters.

During the Summer, you should trim around the outdoor HVAC unit, check your deck and test the irrigation system.

As soon as the Fall arrives, it would help if you cleaned your gutters once again. This is the task that is done bi-annually, and it’s pivotal that your guttering is clean during the colder part of the year. This is also the time for you to inspect your heating, seeing as how postponing this task may be potentially dangerous.

Once-per-decade maintenance tasks

Finally, we come to the tasks that you need to perform once every decade or even every 15-to-20 years.

We’re talking about painting the exterior, replacing the hot water heater, replacing the refrigerator and the range hood, and much more.

Other than this, you might want to check the roofing material in order to see if the roof in question needs a remodel, install a new HVAC unit, and replace your exterior decks.

Sure, every home is subject to depreciation; however, if you intend to stay there, you can prolong the useful life of the place by years, even decades.

In conclusion

In the end, while the list itself seems elaborate, these tasks seldom take too much of your time.

The monthly tasks usually take several minutes of your time (for inspection, that is), while those more difficult tasks typically tend to be ones that you don’t have to perform that often.

Sure, roofing can take days, but it’s something that you do once every 10-to-20 years. In other words, as long as you’re vigilant, this shouldn’t pose a significant problem.

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