If you’ve ever had something break in your home, there’s a good chance it made you realize how little you’d kept up with home maintenance. Whether it’s the fact that your window won’t stay closed, your door frame is rotting or you’re spotting water where it shouldn’t be, what’s once a small fix becomes a large undertaking, all because you didn’t want to address it in time.
What’s even more annoying is that the repairs that are crazy expensive could have been avoided had you done some simple maintenance that, realistically, didn’t require a professional or an entire weekend. We’re talking one hour of maintenance every few months to save you thousands of dollars down the line.
Preventative Maintenance Is Worth It
Why? Well, because when you fail to do small bits of maintenance regularly, things compound. For example, air leaks in and out of the seals of your windows and doors. That moisture starts molding. But your windows are too old to sustain treatment so now, not only are you replacing the seals, but you’re replacing interior rot that became excessive and expansive due to what should have been a small fix – not to mention the walls surrounding the window panes.
The same sentiment occurs with doors. If the hinges are loose and the door isn’t sagging right, it will cause excess stress on the frame, thus allowing for gaps where excess water and air can come in. A simple rusted hinge creates more widespread damage down the line as your entire frame fails to maintain function because of a loose screw.
Especially during hurricane season, however, it’s these minor issues that become problematic. Wind finds its way into any crack. Water can seep in through any little crevice. What seems minor in sunshine turns into a major emergency.
Perform Seal Checks
Perhaps one of the easiest maintenance tasks that people fail to do is checking for any air leaks. Place your hand on your windows or doors as the wind blows through. Do you feel it?
Weather stripping gets old. It’s not designed to last forever so why do people wait until they’re getting blasted by drafts to replace them? It gets dry and cracks. It gets ripped and compressed. You need to check it at least twice a year (pre-summer and pre-winter) to see if it’s worn out or missing – especially in spots where you’ve opened and closed windows/doors regularly. If you can see outside when your door is closed, congratulations – you’ve failed to check on this before.
Weather stripping is easy to replace. Buy it from Home Depot or Lowe’s and cut it in place. You can use it in under thirty minutes per door or window. Just think of the energy costs when you’re conditioned air leaks for months because you’re too stubborn to check windows once or twice a year.
Window seals are similar – a double-pane window is only good if you see zero condensation on the inside panes. If it’s there, you need a new glass unit – which means another window down the line when it condenses again unless you’ve checked on it and maintained before it’s too late with multiple windows.
If you’re dealing with older windows that consistently have issues, it might be time to consider an upgrade. Storm Pro replacement windows offer better performance and less maintenance headache than trying to keep aging units functional, especially in areas where weather puts extra stress on your home’s envelope.
Feel Your Frames
Water damage doesn’t just announce itself; when you fail to pay attention to your frames and continuously let water build up in spots they shouldn’t, it waits until the last second to bring a host of other concerns when it’s finally discovered.
Place your hands towards the bottom of your windows – especially those facing extremes – to see if anything is squishy or rotting. If it smells like mildew or is discolored, you’ve got wood rot setting in (but if you pressed against it enough to feel squishy – it’s gone).
The same applies for doors – water sits at thresholds or permeates through where frames meet drywall. Even if there’s mold settling into corners, it’s time to take note.
If there are spots of rot inside of door frames or window frames, it means it’s cheap fix time for sanding down and treating. If you’ve waited too long and there’s significant damage – it’s replace time for thousands of dollars instead of under fifty dollars.
Exercise Your Windows and Doors
When was the last time you opened every single window in your house? Probably never because people assume they’re “working” because they’re shut properly and left alone.
That’s not true. Windows and doors need to move. The sashes can adhere if they’re never opened out correctly. Tracks fill up with debris over time. Mechanisms stiffen. Why would you force yourself to need a window open amid a power outage in summer when you should have opened it in February?
Every few months, open your windows and check that they can open and close properly without sticking. Lock them, too! Check you’re able to get them back into place after cleaning up the tracks (a vacuum works well with an attachment).
For doors, ensure they close without effort – that means you don’t need to slam anything shut because something shifted somewhere along the line that’s now preventing that door from being forced into place.
Degrease and Oil Everything
In addition to basic cleaning that should happen everywhere in your house (where does dirt go?), whenever something moves – from hinges to locks – it needs special treatment from time to time – or else.
Dirt builds up in various places while grease and grime built up on moving mechanisms have adverse results with dirt; therefore, with no lubrication, they’re not going to work easily down the line.
Cleaning surfaces with appropriate vacuum attachments helps declutter anything from debris before soaking down hinges and locks with silicone-based sprays (not WD-40 because that’s tacky and attracts dirt).
Locks need special attention – they don’t turn well when they’re dirty but they REALLY don’t like being forced amidst an emergency so make sure they’re all movable.
Caulk Everything
Your caulk breaks down over time – sunny or rainy; temperature fluctuations are bad for the sealants you’ve put on throughout your house – and once they start cracking there go water damage risks behind your siding.
Walk around your house every season, ideally in fall and spring climates before winter/summer extremes hit us, and check for any cracking present where caulk previously was.
Caulking again is something that seems useless until you’ve made thousands of dollars in water damage without someone else’s help; caulk comes in an inexpensive tube from Lowe’s or Home Depot and saves you thousands in interior wall damage.
The Bottom Line
None of these pieces are sexy to consider – they aren’t home improvements that excite your home project status on social media – but they’re preventative measures because nothing is worse than having an emergency contractor out when they’ve all gone home for the night during bad weather.
Set reminders for these things every season – take one hour for one maintenance period per year to walk around your house and check all windows/doors for airflow, check seals for wear and tear, look for initial signs of problems that might emerge into bigger problems.
That hour will save you a $20 tube of caulk versus $5,000 later because trust: most expensive home repairs do NOT come out of nowhere; they come from comprehensive losers who fail at addressing small inconveniences until it’s too late.
