Maintaining Your Home

Maintaining Your Home is a time consuming, labour intensive and occasionally expensive exercise, however, there are a few specific things that you can do on an annual basis that can help to prolong the more expensive elements of your home. Certainly, four of the most expensive elements of your home to try to replace are:

Your Roof
Your Windows
Your Furnace
Your Foundation

There are simple, and inexpensive things you can do on an annual basis that will go a long way towards maintaining and extending the life of these elements of your home. Have you ever seen a roof with Moss all over it? This is caused by too much shade and moisture on your shingles – almost always a result of trees growing over top of your roof. One of the simplest (and cheapest) things you can to do maintain the integrity of your roof shingles is to get up and cut back those tree limbs. This helps with two things actually – it keeps the constant shade off your roof, eliminating moss, and also helps to keep your gutters clean – no more constant climbing up to get the sludge and leaves out! Your Windows are the portals out to the world, but you must remember that they are also where the world comes in to you! A quick walk around your home to check the seals, and even resealing or recaulking your windows, on an annual basis will ensure that you don’t get wind and water into places that you don’t want! Your Furnace is definitely something that you probably don’t want to take apart and maintain yourself – it is much better left to the professionals, but having your furnace checked once a year is a good idea – it is much better to see your furnace repair person for an hour in the fall than it is to get that bill after seeing them for a whole day in February! You can check with your preferred home heating company, or log onto our website – www.HOMESINHRM.com - to find links to companies that will do annual checkups on your furnace. One more thing… Having your ducts cleaned? Probably not worth the money unless you have done some major Reno’s in the last year! Save your money for a nice dinner! Finally, your foundation – by far the major point of concern with home buyers. To maintain your foundation is really a matter of maintaining the lay of the land around your home. You should have a negative grade (ground should be sloping away) from all sides of your home. After a good rainfall, take a quick walk around your home and make sure that there are no puddles of water sitting around your home next to your foundation. If there is, you should attempt to build up the ground near the home at that point so that rainwater runs off safely away from the Foundation. In fact, almost every basement leak can be fixed by simply getting the water away from the foundation with better grading.

All of these solutions put together will cost you less than $200 a year to do, and could save you tens of thousands of Dollars in the long term!