Indications That A House Could Be High-Maintenance

When you get ready to buy a house, you also need to be prepared to maintain that home. The average homeowner can spend $6,000, and spend 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 maintaining a house.

It’s not surprising that a home requires maintenance, of course, but it’s a mistake to assume that all homes come with similar maintenance requirements. Some properties have design features or materials that will need more maintenance. If you’re not cautious you can overlook a red flag and find yourself stuck in an endless home maintenance circle which takes more of your time and money than you expected.

Here are some obvious signs that a property you’re considering might be a high-maintenance house—if you notice one of these signs, you should probably add a lot more hours and dollars to your potential maintenance bill.

^{Outdated Systems}

What might be an obvious sign a home could be a maintenance sink hole? Ancient wiring and plumbing. If you see old-school, ungrounded power outlets throughout, 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 ceilings can make a house feel grand and open. But high ceilings complicate maintenance and repair of the home, and they add to the cost of heating and cooling that air space. Painting high walls and ceilings will likely require scaffolding, and even relatively simple maintenance tasks like changing a light bulb can be a challenge. If it’s one grand room that feels like a cathedral, you might get by with that, but if your whole house feels like an concert hall, consider the extra work will add up over the years.

^{Remote Spaces}

If the home has a crawl space underneath, make sure you can access it. Crawlspaces often contain vital system components for the home, like water pipes, sewer plumbing, electrical wiring, or ducting. If the only way to access the remote space is to crawl and creep under the house from the outside, or if there’s no access at all because the crawl space is too small, this will complicate future repairs and upgrades to those pipes, wires, or ducts.

^{Stone Foundations And Stone Features}

When viewing a potential home, look at materials like natural stone. These might appear esthetically pleasing, but sedimentary rock formed by the chemical precipitation of calcium carbonate minerals can take additional care to maintain. Field stone basement walls are another sign that you might be spending time with water leaks.

Complex roof

A home’s roof is important—it protects you from the elements. Any roof will require some regular maintenance, and every roof is vulnerable to leaks. But if your roof has lots of valleys and angles, gables, and other features it’s going to require a lot more maintenance. The most common leak spots on a roof are around those places where flashing or other sealing edges keep things dry (you hope), so more of them means you’ll be keeping an eye on your roof