Home Maintenance Tips When Moving from Renting to Owning

It’s the dream of many to someday be a homeowner. Nobody is saying the house shopping, financing, and moving is easy, but there is a certain, “I’ve made it” factor to owning your own place. Looking back however, renting was a pretty cake gig, especially when you consider all the home maintenance responsibilities that now fall on your lap instead of a landlord or property management group. 

Home maintenance isn’t just fiddling around in the yard on the weekends. In fact, without proper maintenance you’ll decrease the lifespan of many of your home components and promote increased damage to the others. Nobody is saying you have to know how to frame a house or rewire your electrical system, but these home maintenance tips should be mandatory as you move from being a renter to an owner.

Changing HVAC Filter Get yourself acquainted with your furnace and air-conditioner filter really quick because you’re going to becoming close friends. In fact, depending on the filter type and the HVAC system manufacturer recommendations could be for swapping in a new piece as little as every 30 days. It may seem tedious, but you’ll want to change the filters often not only for improved breathing conditions in your home, but also to help lower heating and cooling bills and to expand the life span of your AC and furnace.

Cleaning Out Gutters 

Gutters might seem like they’re simply there for your convenience to effortlessly whisk water away from your path. The truth is, gutters that are clogged or malfunctioning can be a deathtrap. Consider the layout of your roof with eaves to collect water and send it to the gutters for safe dispersal. When that water can’t evacuate it piles up over the gutters and into the fascia. This rots the fascia boards and creates a hole that leads all the way down through the back of your siding. Not only that, the overflowing water settles around your foundation, eventually making it’s way into your basement causing flood damage.

Stop Air Loss 

You’ll want to constantly keep an eye out for air leaks as another way to lower your utility bills. Heated and cooled air most often seaps out via cracks near your windows and doors but can also escape through spots like an uninsulated attic or via inferior windows. Missing siding has kind of the same effect so always feel around for drafts in the house and make the corresponding repairs.

Tape Your Foundation Cracks 

Some maintenance doesn’t do anything but monitoring. Taping any cracks in your foundation is one such task. You tape these cracks to know whether they are ‘natural’ or are growing. Since you’ve just moved in, you don’t really know how the house has settled. If these cracks grow, you can fix the problem on your own terms instead of on that of gushing water into the basement.

Monitor and Document Bills 

There could be a multitude of areas driving up unnecessarily high utility costs such as low-efficiency lighting, running toilets or faucets, a bad HVAC thermostat, etc. Keep an eye on these bills and see if you can lower them – or perform maintenance if these costs suddenly start to rise.

Congratulations on becoming a homeowner…and good luck!

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