Eight Signs That Your Home Will Require Special Care
When you’re looking to buy a home, you also need to prepare for its upkeep . The average homeowner spends $6,000 and more than 500 hours a year (including five hours a week on cleaning alone) maintaining their home—cleaning, repairing, and managing everything that goes into maintaining a home.
Of course, it’s not surprising that a property requires maintenance, but it would be a mistake to assume that all homes have the same maintenance requirements. Some properties have design options, infrastructure or materials that will require more than average maintenance. If you’re not careful, you could miss the red flag and end up in home maintenance hell, where trying to keep your home in good condition takes up more and more of your time and money.
There are a few obvious signs that the property you’re considering will be a high-maintenance home: If you notice one of these warning signs, you should be mentally adding a lot more hours and dollars to your potential maintenance bill.
Outdated infrastructure
An obvious sign that maintaining a home won’t be easy? Old wiring and plumbing. If you see outdated, ungrounded outlets or cast-iron plumbing fixtures everywhere, the house hasn’t been updated in a long time. In addition to safety concerns due to ancient wiring and possibly lead pipes, the age of these systems will require more repairs and temporary maintenance until you’re ready to splurge and upgrade everything.
High ceilings
High ceilings can make a home feel grand and spacious. But those high ceilings make your home more difficult to maintain and renovate (not to mention increasing your space’s heating and cooling costs). Painting very high walls and ceilings will likely require hired scaffolding, and even relatively simple maintenance tasks like changing a light bulb can be a challenge if you have high ceilings that can’t be reached with a standard ladder. If it’s one “great room” that feels like a cathedral, you may be up for the challenge, but if your entire home resembles an airplane hangar, consider how the extra work will add up over the years.
Inaccessible crawling areas
If there is a basement under the house, make sure you know how to access it and that it can be accessed. Crawl spaces often contain vital home infrastructure, such as water and sewer pipes, electrical wiring and air ducts. If the only way to access the basement is to crawl under the house from the outside, or if there is no access at all because the basement is too shallow, this will complicate any future efforts to repair or upgrade those pipes, wires or ducts – because you will have to lift floors, which increases costs and time even for relatively simple repairs.
Tons of natural stone
When viewing a potential home, pay attention to the materials used. Natural stones like travertine look beautiful and add glamor to any home, but if you see natural stone everywhere, be prepared to spend a lot of time maintaining it. Natural stone is porous, stains easily, and requires regular sealing, so if you see it being used on half the floor of the house, you better start investing some extra time in maintenance.
Lots of small tiles
Speaking of tiles, the number and size of tiles will have a big impact on how much time you spend on maintenance. If you have a lot of small tiles in your home, like penny tiles or mosaic tiles, that means the grout will be exposed to a lot more, and you’ll have to do a lot more cleaning and sealing to keep it looking nice. The math is simple: More grout lines mean more nooks and crannies for mold and dirt to nest in. While a little penny or mosaic tile in a bathroom may not be a deal-breaker, if it’s more common, be prepared for some extra work.
Luxurious landscape design
Landscaping is a combination of hardscape (stone paths, walls, water features) and living things. Of course, all of this needs to be looked after, but your main concern is the living organisms: if the landscaping is complex and extensive, are you prepared for the ongoing effort to keep all those plants a) alive and b) in their place? Unless you’re willing to trade in careful landscaping for lower-maintenance plants, it’s going to be a constant battle or ongoing expense if you decide to hire landscapers to maintain it all.
And if you have a pool in your backyard, you’re even worse off : Pools need to be cleaned regularly, filtration systems maintained, water chemistry maintained, and something done to them in the winter. if you live in a cool climate. A pool is a big job on top of other landscaping jobs, so be prepared to put in the work.
Lots of windows
A home with lots of windows is flooded with light and can feel fresh and spacious. It’s also a maintenance bust because each of those windows will need to be cleaned, caulked, repaired (including damaged screens), and possibly painted. Of course, this is true for any home with any number of windows, but each additional window in a home requires additional time and maintenance costs, so moving to a glass home should give you pause.
Anything else to consider? Non-standard sizes. It’s one thing to replace or repair standard windows; if all the windows in your home are non-standard sizes, you’ll have to spend even more money to replace them.
Complex roof
The roof of your home is vital – it protects you from the elements. Every roof requires regular inspection and maintenance , and every roof is vulnerable to accidental leaks. But if your roof is “complex,” meaning it has many angles, gables, and other features (as opposed to a relatively simple flat or A-frame roof), it will require much more effort to maintain. This is because at every place where the plane shifts – where the horizontal part of the roof meets the vertical – you will have a weak spot. The most common areas of roof leaks are around areas where you rely on waterproofing to keep things dry, so the more of these you have, the more effort you’ll have to put into keeping your roof in good condition.