Home Maintenance Calendar

A small number of items on this calendar are on it for a different reason from the rest, and they take minutes.

Testing smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, monthly. Working alarms roughly halve the risk of dying in a house fire, and the test button exists because alarms fail silently.

Clearing the dryer lint trap housing and duct opening. Lint is the leading contributing factor in the roughly thirteen thousand US dryer fires a year.

Testing the water heater's temperature and pressure relief valve. It is the device that prevents a water heater becoming an explosive, and it seizes if never operated.

Testing GFCI outlets, which fail silently and are the protection against electrocution in wet locations. Testing the garage door auto-reverse, which is a life-safety device. And inspecting a deck ledger, because ledger failure is the leading cause of catastrophic deck collapse.

None of those takes more than a few minutes and all of them are on the calendar ahead of anything cosmetic. If the year goes badly and things get dropped, these are the ones to keep.

The widely quoted guidance is to set aside one per cent of a home's value each year for maintenance. It is a rule of thumb rather than a forecast, and like most rules of thumb it is roughly right on average and wrong for any specific year.

What it is really describing is a reserve rather than a budget. Most years cost far less than one per cent. Then the roof needs replacing, or the furnace fails in February, or the water heater goes, and that year costs several times it. The reserve exists so that those years are funded rather than borrowed.

The rule needs adjusting for age, which the plain version does not do. A five-year-old house has almost no major systems near end of life; a seventy-year-old house frequently has several arriving together, because roofs, furnaces, water heaters and service panels all have overlapping lifespans and were often all installed at the same time.

So the figure here scales with the age of the house. If several major systems are original and past their expected life, treat even that as a floor — replacements are not far away, and knowing that is more useful than being surprised by it.

If a single group of tasks on this calendar deserves priority over the others, it is the drainage group, and the reason is straightforward: water causes more expensive damage to houses than everything else combined.

Four tasks make up almost all of it. Clearing gutters, so water is collected rather than running down the wall. Checking downspouts discharge at least six feet from the foundation, because gutters that dump at the wall have simply made the problem efficient. Checking the ground still slopes away from the house, since backfill settles over years and reverses. And testing the sump pump before the season rather than during it.

Together those take perhaps four hours a year. The alternative is a wet basement, which typically costs five figures to remediate properly and reduces the value of the house until it is fixed.

The autumn gutter clearing is the single most important of the four in a cold climate, because a gutter blocked when the freeze arrives forms an ice dam, and an ice dam pushes water back under the roof covering and into the ceiling below.

The months here follow a conventional temperate northern-hemisphere year, and several tasks are placed deliberately rather than arbitrarily.

Heating service in September, before the season rather than during it — a technician in September has availability and you are not without heat while waiting. Air conditioning service in April, for the same reason.

Hose bibs drained and shut off in October, before the first hard freeze, because a split hose bib is inside the wall and floods on the thaw. Irrigation blown out at the same time.

Gutters twice: April after spring seed fall, and November after the leaves are down. The autumn one matters more.

If you live somewhere the seasons run differently — the deep south, the Pacific Northwest, or the southern hemisphere — shift the seasonal group and leave the monthly items alone. The safety tasks are not seasonal at all.

This calendar deliberately excludes cleaning, and the separation is not arbitrary.

Maintenance is the work that stops a house degrading: gutters, caulk, roof inspection, water heater flushing, chimney sweeping, deck sealing. Skipping it has consequences measured in thousands of dollars and years of accumulated damage.

Cleaning is the work that keeps a house pleasant: vacuuming, bathrooms, kitchen surfaces, laundry. Skipping it for a fortnight has no lasting effect at all.

They run on different rhythms, have different consequences, and are best kept apart — combining them produces a list so long that neither gets done, which is precisely the failure mode of the all-in-one household checklist. The house cleaning schedule covers the other half, and the two are designed to sit alongside each other.