When you get ready to buy a home, you also need to get ready to maintain that home. The average homeowner spends $6,000 and more than 500 hours a year (including five hours a week of just cleaning) maintaining their homes—cleaning, repairing, and managing all the stuff that goes into running a house.
It’s no surprise that a property requires maintenance, of course, but it’s a mistake to assume that all homes come with similar maintenance requirements. Some properties have design choices, infrastructure, or materials that will need more than your average amount of maintenance. If you’re not careful, you can overlook a red flag and find yourself stuck in home maintenance hell where trying to keep your house in good shape takes more and more of your time and money.
There are some obvious signs that a property you’re considering will be a high-maintenance house—if you notice one of these red flags, you should mentally add a lot more hours and dollars to your potential maintenance bill.
Outdated infrastructure
An obvious sign that the house will be a bear to maintain? Old wiring and plumbing. If you see old-school, ungrounded power outlets throughout or cast iron plumbing, the house hasn’t been upgraded in a long time. Aside from safety issues with ancient wiring and potentially lead pipes, the age of these systems will require more repairs and stopgap maintenance until you’re ready to splash out and upgrade everything.
High ceilings
High, soaring ceilings can make a house feel grand and spacious. But those high ceilings complicate maintenance and repair of the home (not to mention driving up the costs to heat and cool the place). Painting very high walls and ceilings will likely require rented scaffolding, and even relatively simple maintenance tasks like changing a light bulb can be a challenge when you’ve got high ceilings that are beyond the reach of a standard ladder. If it’s one “great room” that feels like a cathedral, you might be up for the challenge, but if your whole house feels like an airplane hangar, consider how the extra work will add up over the years.
Inaccessible crawl spaces
If the home has a crawl space underneath, make sure you know how to access it—and that it can be accessed. Crawlspaces often contain vital infrastructure for the home, like water and sewer pipes, electrical wiring, and ductwork. If the only way to access the crawl space is to wriggle under the house from the outside, or if there’s no access at all because the crawl space is too shallow, this will complicate any future efforts to repair or upgrade those pipes, wires, or ducts—because you’ll be forced to pull up your floors, adding expense and time to even relatively simple repairs.
Tons of natural stone
When touring a potential home, pay attention to the materials used. Natural stones like travertine look beautiful and add a touch of glamour to any house, but if you see natural stone everywhere, be ready to put a lot of time into maintaining them. Natural stone is porous, stains easily, and requires regular sealing, so if you see it used in half the flooring of the house, you’d better start blocking off some extra maintenance time.
Lots of tiny tile
Speaking of tile, the amount and size of the tile will have a big impact on how much time you’ll wind up spending on maintenance. If the home uses a lot of small tiles like penny tiles or mosaic tiles, that means a lot more grout exposure—and a lot more cleaning and sealing you’ll have to do to keep it looking nice. The math is simple: More grout lines equal more nooks and crannies for mold and grime to settle in. While some penny or mosaic tile in a bathroom may not be a deal-breaker, if it’s more prevalent, be ready for the extra work.
Lavish landscaping
Landscaping is a combination of hardscape (stone walkways, walls, water features) and living things. All of it needs to be maintained, of course, but the living stuff is your main concern: If the landscaping is complex and extensive, are you ready for the non-stop effort to keep all those plants a) alive and b) in their place? Unless you’re going to trade in the elaborate landscaping for plants requiring lower maintenance, it’s going to be a constant battle—or a constant expense if you choose to hire landscapers to maintain it all.
And if there’s a pool in the back yard, you’re even worse off: Pools need to be cleaned regularly, filter systems need to be maintained, the water chemistry has to be maintained, and something needs to be done about them during the winter if you live in a cool climate. A pool is a lot of work on top of the other landscaping work, so be prepared to be busy.
Lots of windows
A house with a lot of windows is flooded with light and can look fresh and airy. It’s also a sinkhole of maintenance, because each one of those windows will need to be cleaned, caulked, repaired (including damaged screens), and possibly painted. This will be true in any house with any number of windows, of course, but each additional window in the house represents additional time and cost to maintain, so moving into a glass house should give you pause.
Something else to consider? Custom sizes. It’s one thing to replace or repair standard windows—if the windows in your home are all custom sizes, you’ll have to spend even more money to replace them.
Complex roof
A home’s roof is vital—it protects you from the elements. Any roof will require some regular inspection and maintenance work, and every roof is vulnerable to occasional leaks. But if your roof is “complex,” meaning that it has a lot of angles, gables, and other features (as opposed to being a relatively simple flat roof or A-frame roof), it’s going to be a lot more maintenance. That’s because every place you have a plane shift—when a horizontal aspect of the roof meets a vertical—you’ll have a vulnerable spot. The most common leak spots on a roof are around these areas where you’re relying on the flashing to keep things dry, so the more of them you have, the more work you’ll be putting into keeping your roof in good shape.
