There are many ways to create a beautiful home, from a chef’s kitchen and spa-like bathrooms to building a true backyard paradise complete with a diving pool and a putting green. You can decorate and enhance your home with rich, elegant colors and textures on the walls, adorn your windows with fancy coverings, and furnish it with the entire Pottery Barn catalog. Any and all of these are great, and they will certainly make your home stand out, but today we’re going to talk about something far less glamorous. Let’s talk about how you can actually KEEP a home beautiful by maintaining it well. We’ll look at how basic maintenance can create a more enjoyable experience owning your home, save you money, and why it matters so much when you decide to sell it someday.
If you have ever been to a brand-new restaurant just as it opened, you can see the time and attention that were paid to making everything just right. All of the furniture, dishes, and even the faucets in the bathroom are pristine and clean. Then, you go back after a few months and there is a tear in the fabric of the seat, the faucet is loose and covered in calcium, and the sense of “clean” you once felt seems to be a thing of the past. With the amount of traffic a restaurant gets, this is a far more accelerated version of what happens to our own homes. All of the little things that are either broken, worn out, or dirty start to add up. Taking the time to make note of these little things is a great first step, but addressing them as you see them is critical.
When you see a loose door handle or a cabinet drawer that is not closing correctly, the time to fix that is now so that it doesn’t get worse over time or cause ancillary damage. The scuffs on the wall are very easy to touch up in a few minutes with a small amount of paint and a brush so that later you don’t end up having to repaint the entire wall. Broken light switches, outlets, and burnt-out bulbs happen, but when one turns into five, it starts to feel like disrepair. Take care to notice if the grout in your floor is clean and not crumbling. Fixing or cleaning it before it is permanently stained or falling apart will keep you from having to redo the whole floor. When you see the caulk around your tubs and showers yellowing and cracking, you can avoid water damage by catching it early. Strip the old caulk and redo it. This 20-minute project might cost you $5, but could literally save you thousands to remediate mold behind the wall.
Minor repairs and touch-ups that I just mentioned will add up, as I said, but the larger, more expensive repairs will sneak up on you. Air conditioning units, water heaters, and even your roof, fall into the category of items you don’t think much about until there is an issue. This is why regular scheduled maintenance is vital. A six month tune-up on your HVAC system might cost you $150, but it will ensure that your unit is running as it should, and will allow you to catch the costly repairs before it’s 120 degrees outside and it stops working. Doing a yearly flush on your water heater is something that can be done by a handyman, and will avoid build-up that can take years off of the life of it. And having a roof inspection every couple of years will allow you to catch broken, slipped or missing roof tiles, which will avoid many very costly repairs that a leak can cause.
It may sound to you like I’ve just helped you create a honey-do list, and you might be asking how in the world this would make owning your home “more enjoyable.” Nobody wants more chores, to be sure, but when addressed as they come up, the “chore” becomes a very small task. Doesn’t living in a home that still feels as clean and functional as the day you moved in sound more enjoyable than living in something that feels like it’s falling apart or in need of an intense deep clean? I think so, and so will a future buyer. Someday, if or when you decide to sell your home, you will be mighty glad that you took the time to maintain what you have.
The list of minor fixes and the major repairs that are only found during inspection could be the difference between getting an offer at all, and will certainly help you keep the buyer you have when the inspector gives a clean bill of health. If you’re thinking about selling your home anytime in the next year or two and would like a full room-by-room “prep-guide,” please email Nate@brillteam.com and we’ll send you our comprehensive booklet that will help put you on track to be market-ready :)