Essential Home Maintenance Tips Including Better Air Quality Solutions

Owning a house means taking on a multitude of responsibilities that, while being a burden, essentially protect your most valuable financial investment and enable you and your family to live in a comfortable and safe home. Truly, maintaining a house is a greater burden and is often viewed by most homeowners as a more compressed, periodic set of tasks. Many homeowners will often wait until serious problems have manifested themselves in either the house's structure or some major house system. However, being professional and maintaining a house in an active, routine manner is far more cost-effective, saves a lot of time, and is more structurally sound in the long run. The avoidance of expensive repairs will be more than worth it as your home's energy efficiency will be improved, and the comfort and durability of the home will be increased.

The purpose for this guide is to help home owners learn and develop a basic home maintenance system. Its purpose is to help systematize the home maintenance process in order to most effectively and proactively manage risks to the home's structure and, most importantly, optimize the comfort and safety of the home's interior. Ideally, it will help both the new and old homeowners manage and, more importantly, protect their most valuable asset. It will help make the home a safe, reliable, comfortable, and high-performing sanctuary.

The Importance of Preventative Maintenance

A strong home foundation is built on preventative maintenance, ensuring it is high-value and long-lasting. This involves regularly scheduled evaluations and maintenance to find and fix issues before they become large concerns. This can be mechanical issues, structural concerns, and anything in-between. An appealing home is more than just attractive to guests. A home will retain its value long after a renovation if its systems are reliably functional.

Using the Seasons to Your Advantage

Finding the optimal time to focus on home inspections may seem like a daunting task. Timing your inspections with the change of the seasons will simplify this process. You will primarily focus on the exterior of your home this spring. This will include your roofing shutters and siding and their integrity. This will include ensuring nothing is blocking your drainage systems and gutters. Gutters that are blocked by debris or leaves will cause water to overflow and jump directly into your foundation. This results in costly water damage and potentially flooding.

During autumn, the priority is to safeguard the house against winter. Inspect all windows and exterior doors to check the weather stripping. Small air gaps cause bigger heat loss and rising utility costs. Make sure winter prep for the heating system has been completed. Walk-throughs to identify small cracks and signs of deterioration are wise to prevent bigger problems that are costly. Walk-throughs should happen twice a year.

There are plumbing and electrical issues that are definitely a job for licensed, insured, contractors, but there are minor plumbing and electrical tasks that should be the responsibility of the homeowner. Look for evidence of dampness and mineral deposits that are signs of leaks and dripping in the hard-to-reach areas under kitchen and bathroom sinks. Small, slow leaks can lead to extensive water damage and mold that become a bigger problem that is noticed later.

With electrical systems, you must pay particular attention to your circuit breaker panel. You should periodically check that all circuit breakers are labeled and that all circuit breakers engage and disengage easily. If you have lights that flicker and/or circuit breakers that trip for no apparent reason, you should not ignore these problems. These problems usually indicate an overloaded circuit. More complicated problems with your wiring may be the cause. These problems will require the attention of an electrician. Being attentive to your circuit breaker panel protects your home from the risk of electrical fires and costly water damage.

The importance of the quality of the air that you and your family breathe every day is usually an afterthought in most home maintenance plans. Poor quality, indoor air frequently causes respiratory problems, and symptoms of poor health with no discernable cause. Fortunately, the air in your home can be determined to be clean, fresh, and filtered by the application of a few, simple, bounds requiring, disciplined actions.

In the pursuit of energy efficient homes, modern architecture has caused a problem for interior air quality. A home that is energy efficient, and well-designed, is also sealed from the exterior. This seal supports the containment of indoor air pollutants in the home. This dust, dander, and VOCs become trapped.

The optimum air improvement strategy incorporates intentional ventilation and high-efficiency filtration. During seasons with mild temperature and weather conditions, take advantage of those days to completely remove and refresh the air in your house by opening all the windows. In the higher moisture areas of the house, such as the bathroom and kitchen, you must use high-capacity exhaust fans to remove the moisture and odors and push them outside. Additionally, you must be extremely careful and replace the air filters in your HVAC system every three months, or more frequently, if you have pets. Using a high efficiency and high MERV rated filter also helps with the efficiency of your HVAC system and reduces the circulation of indoor pollutants and particulates. If you suspect that your centralized ventilation system has a significant amount of dust and debris, a professional air duct cleaning service can offer a system to help ensure the air in your home stays clean and at its best.

Humidity Control

One factor of overall indoor air quality that is often overlooked and even more often neglected, at least in the author's experience, are the humidity levels in the indoor environment. Having high humidity levels also provides the perfect environment for mold and dust mites which are a source of many common allergens. You also want to try to avoid environments that support the formation of these biological pests. Therefore, you want to maintain a relative indoor humidity of 30 - 50 percent.

To keep your basement or naturally damp rooms dry, use a high-capacity dehumidifier during the summer’s peak humidity. Use a whole-house humidifier in the dry, harsh winter so your skin and the hardwood furnishings and floors in your house don’t dry out. It’s easy to keep humidity levels in check using a digital hygrometer, and that lets you maintain the environmental balance that you control.

Maintenance of the Exterior and Curb Appeal

The outside of your house is your first defense against the elements. Keeping your home’s protective exterior from being damaged means the interior of your home doesn’t get damaged or get pests infiltrating.

Landscaping and Drainage

Good landscaping keeps your home’s health and your property’s curb appeal up. Be sure all your shrubs, decorative trees, and all your mulch beds are at least one foot from your home’s exterior walls. Contacting or overhanging house vegetation transfers moisture to your home’s siding and foundation and offers wood destroying pests a direct entry into your home.

You also have to consider the soil grade surrounding your foundation. To help direct rainwater away from the base of your home and into the surrounding landscape, the soil surrounding your foundation should have an even, consistent slope away from the foundation in all directions. If there are any dips or low spots in the soil, they should be filled with quality topsoil to create an even slope away from the foundation. This is a great way to direct rainwater away from your foundation and help reduce the chances of leaks in your basement, and also reduce the chances of bowing walls and cracking in your foundation.

Maintaining Your Siding and Finishes

All of the siding on your house needs quality maintenance, no matter if it is wood, vinyl, or brick. Pressure washing is a great way to clean your house. This gets rid of the dirt and mold that can damage your house, as long as the right equipment and settings are used. If your home has a painted wood exterior, you should check it each year for signs of damage to the paint that can compromise siding. Touching up these localized spots as soon as they are identified can help prevent the need for more costly and time-intensive work of replacing large areas of siding.

The Key to Planning an Annual Maintenance Schedule

It is not uncommon for people to feel intimidated by the seemingly infinite number of home maintenance tasks. However, the key to success is simply being organized. There is no need to try to handle every task at the same time. Instead, you can easily break the home maintenance tasks that you need to do throughout the year into smaller segments by creating an annual schedule that is easy to integrate into your day-to-day life.

The Master Maintenance Schedule

In order to help maintain some of that annual organization, consider implementing a master schedule that utilizes time intervals:

Monthly - Test all smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Flush the kitchen drains and garbage disposals with a natural cleaning solution. Visually check the HVAC filters.

Quarterly - Check the charge of all fire extinguishers. Test the sump pump by manually adding water to the pit to engage the float switch. Dust the coils of the refrigerator.

Biannually - Clean all gutters and downspouts. Flush the water heater to clear sediment. Service the HVAC unit. Check the perimeter of the house for pests.

Annually - Inspect the roof for shingles and the chimney for masonry. Check attic insulation for moisture and pests. Check the seals on all windows and doors.

By spreading these activities throughout the year, you can avoid large home maintenance tasks monopolizing your weekends. In addition, keep a physical or digital binder to store receipts and contracts of home maintenance and services. This binder will be valuable for potential home buyers. It will show buyers that you cared for your home and that home maintenance was completed beyond your control.

Conclusion

Home maintenance is an investment in your comfort and health, as well as the health and comfort of your family. Most importantly, home maintenance is an investment in your financial future. Instead of treating home maintenance as an emergency repair, approach it as a process of care and repair. Checking your HVAC, and ensuring that your home soil is properly drained are small home maintenance tasks that will make your home a more enjoyable and resilient place to live. These tasks will increase the value of your home.

Make the decision to look around your home with the intention of gathering fresh insights and ideas about how to best maintain it for the next few months. Take note of the things that need to be done, and set out to do the one thing that can’t be put off. If you’ve been putting off a safety and security check of your home systems, this is your sign. Call one of your favorite, trusted professionals to perform a full, diagnostic checkup. Your home works hard to support and protect your family. As long as you remain organized and focused, you will find that well-maintained systems will yield the home of your dreams. Start this long-needed maintenance today, to keep your systems working well.

 

Sara,

Digital marketing consultant, writer, freelancer, WordPress enthusiast, and coffee lover.

https://www.sanitairllc.com/