Running a household, especially if you have children and own your own home, could easily be considered a fulltime job. This is why sometimes we can let home improvement jobs fall by the wayside. We’re either too busy or don’t have the funds right now to get them sorted.
But there are significant benefits to maintaining your home other than the fact that it will simply look nice or even make your home more pleasant to live in. While you might have to invest some time and/or funds into a home improvement job, it could save you money in the long run or at least prevent any further financial issues.
Here are a few home improvement tasks that are definitely worth the investment.
Making Urgent Repairs
When it comes to home improvement, one of the best things you can do is to do a bit of home improvement triage. In a medical setting, triage is the process that medical professionals use to prioritize certain patients. They use different criteria to do this, including the severity of the condition, how quickly they can treat the patient, and how urgently something needs to be treated before it gets better.
You can use similar criteria to determine when to fix things around your house. Urgent issues take priority over anything else, especially if they can cause more damage over time or they create an unsafe environment.
The most common urgent repair is likely a plumbing disaster or another kind of leak. These issues can crop up seemingly without warning, especially during the winter when outside pipes might burst, and they end up hemorrhaging water. If this happens, the sooner you can call a plumber, the better.
Other urgent repairs might include any structural damage that exposes your home to the elements, electrical damage that might cause a fire, or any damage that could result in a collapse or a similar issue. Always check your home after a storm or a similar event that could have caused damage.
Preventative Maintenance
As mentioned above, urgent repairs have to be dealt with quickly to essentially make sure that you don’t end up spending more than you have to. The longer you leave those repairs, the worse the problem will become and the more expensive it will end up.
Urgent repairs can be expensive, which is why the best option is often preventative maintenance. If you can stop a disaster from happening, you’re one step ahead and you’ve already saved money. True, you can’t stop every disaster, but you can do a surprising amount to mitigate them.
For example, let’s look at plumbing issues in winter. If it gets especially cold in your area, your pipes can freeze. This can cause damage to the pipe itself, as well as making it more difficult for you to access water. Often, this leads to cracks and burst pipes, which can be an expensive problem to fix. While you can’t prevent winter, you can insulate your external pipes and make it so they’re less likely to freeze.
If your home is in good condition, it’s less likely to suffer if there is a disaster. You also prevent problems that are caused by wear and tear. Just because a problem seems to come out of nowhere, it doesn’t mean that there weren’t any warning signs. Use a checklist to help you check on potential problem areas in your home and make sure that everything is in good condition. This might save you from expensive repairs in the future.
Cutting Utility Costs
Another way that home improvements can save you money is through your utility costs. As well as your mortgage and the costs of any repairs, you’re likely well aware of the other costs of running your home. Electricity, water, and in some cases, gas all add up over time.
These are basic needs, but it doesn’t mean that they’re cheap. While there are some other methods to cut down on your utility costs, like using a smart meter to control how you heat your home, some home improvement tasks can do a great deal to help.
For example, you likely use electricity or gas to heat your home. But if your home isn’t properly insulated, your heating system needs to work much harder to keep it warm and comfortable, which uses more electricity and costs more money.
If you can improve your insulation, you don’t have to spend as much to keep your home warm. One way to do this is by looking into replacement windows and installation. You might not realize how inefficient your old windows were until you get them replaced, because it can make a huge difference. You shouldn’t have a draft or be able to hear every gust of wind outside. These are signs that the windows aren’t properly sealed, which lets all that precious heat leave your home.
You can also look into the roof of your property, the doors, and the insulation itself. While these parts of your home have a long lifespan, they do need to be maintained and even replaced to keep your property costs down.
DIY Jobs to Save Money
While many jobs require a professional touch, you might be surprised to find that you can do a lot of basic maintenance at home. If you weren’t taught how to do this, it might seem like a daunting task, but you can learn at any age.
Ask a friend, a relative to help you complete some maintenance tasks and teach you how to do it yourself. Or, even better, you can learn using YouTube. There are loads of channels out there designed to help people learn how to do basic things like fix a dripping faucet, unclog a drain, or paint a wall effectively.
If you can do some of these tasks yourself, you don’t feel the need to put them off so you can save for a contractor, and you can keep your home looking its best.
