I am repeatedly reminded of the importance of doing regular, boring maintenance to your home. Not the fun stuff like redoing a room, but the important stuff like getting your windows washed and painting outside trim to prevent wood rot.

This was brought home to me recently as I showed a listing to a client. “Bring some lysol,” warned the listing agent. What an understatement! Before we even went in the house, we noticed the overflowing gutters and stained trim. Inside, the fans were caked with dust, the carpets were stained, and the smell was overwhelming. This was not a rental property but where a homeowner lives. Needless to say, it was hard for my clients to even consider this house their potential home.

This is an extreme example of course. Most people are going to do a good scrubbing before they list their home, but there are subtler things that home owners often overlook. Many of these are outside the home. Most of us when outside are working in the yard or playing with our kids, we are not examining our home. If outside things are overlooked, they sometimes can’t just be fixed with a good scrubbing, but will have led to bigger, more expensive fixes.

Here are some suggestions for regular home maintenance:

1. Clean the gutters. Not only do full gutters look bad, if they are full they aren’t doing the job of redirecting the water away from your home. Water around your foundation can cause structural issues. Structural issues lead to buyers walking away or very expensive fixes. Many people are happy to clean gutters themselves (put it in your calendar to remind yourself to do it twice a year), but if not, typically there are coupons online. I have started scheduling a service once a year to come out and they honor the original special price each time.

2. Check for rotting wood. Twice a year, walk around your home and make note of any trim or other wood that has peeling paint or looks warped. If the paint is just starting to peel, you can often put a fresh coat on that one spot and preserve the wood. If a board is warped or already rotting, then have it removed and new wood painted to match. The trim around chimneys seems to be the most common place for wood rot. Staying on top of this will save you a lot of work and expense in the future.

3. Change out your air filters. This should be done at least every 3 months. Also, be sure to check to see if there is a filter on the handler itself. We had a filter on our air handler and didn’t know it and so we didn’t change it for the 4 years we had lived in the house. Perhaps it had never been changed. Our compressor recently went out on our heat pump and we were told that the filthy air filter we were unaware of was probably the culprit.

4. If you have carpet, get it professionally cleaned at least once a year. This will preserve the life of your carpet and save you money in the long run by not having to replace it as quickly. It also makes your home a much more sanitary space.

5. Remember to clean behind your blinds and curtains. If you have some rooms that have blinds that you never raise, it’s easy to forget to clean the window and sills behind them. Not only does an incredible amount of dust and grime collect over the years, windows often have condensation that encourage the growth of mold without proper cleaning. When we take pictures of a home, we raise every blind to let in as much light as possible. Mold and grime are not what you want people to notice.

Doing regular home maintenance is essential to home ownership. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Schedule a few times a year to review the various parts of your home. If you aren’t handy, then develop a good relationship with a local handy person (check out our LIST for some options). Even though it might not be exactly what you want to do with your weekend, a few hours scattered through the year will save you hours of headache and expense down the road. See below for a helpful monthly maintenance checklist or download a copy HERE.