What is preventative home maintenance?
This refers to the regular and routine maintenance required to manage property or any other equipment and ensure they are running at full capacity while also acting as a preventive measure from any unexpected costs and downtime experienced from failure. Preventative maintenance requires careful scheduling and planning all the maintenance tasks before they are set to occur as well as records on previous servicing and inspection reports. The process of creating a preventive maintenance plan can be quite involving for large properties, and therefore, one can rely on various maintenance software tasked with the organization of all the preventive maintenance needs. Preventive maintenance includes a systematic inspection of areas that can be a source of problems and putting in the corrective measures to ensure that they do not actualize to problems in the future. It includes things such as changing the HVAC filters, cleaning the range hood filters, testing the smoke detectors, among others. How to create a preventative maintenance plan for your home
The first step in developing a preventative maintenance plan for your home is having knowledge of the things that should undergo preventative maintenance in your home. One should note them down in a checklist form which he or she will use in carrying out a review of all the maintenance work done. Having a checklist will ensure help increase knowledge of what should be maintained when owning a house and very integral to first-time homeowners. Any updates to be done to a home such as a roof life should also be included here.
After developing the checklist, the next step would be categorizing the identified maintenance tasks in various categories such as the frequency of their maintenance, the nature of maintenance required, the interval of maintenance, among others. Doing this helps in determining which maintenance tasks require immediate intervention, which requires scheduled repetitive maintenance tasks such as monthly repairs or annual inspections and the extent of the damage if the maintenance task is not done.
After categorizing the maintenance tasks to be undertaken, it is key that one develops the schedule that will be observed in carrying out the home maintenance tasks. The maintenance schedule helps show when a certain maintenance task will be undertaken and who will undertake it. One thing you should take not in developing a schedule is observing the level of priority that a certain task demands. Those with a higher priority should come first in the schedule. After scheduling a high priority maintenance tasks, schedule the other activities in order of their intervals, i.e., annually, quarterly. Much as the costs of carrying out such tasks keeps on changing depending on factors such as the extent of damage, complexity of the task and the person undertaking it; one should strive in coming up with a budget that will help track the expenses involved in any maintenance tasks. This ensures that a homeowner does not suffer unseen costs in the future.
The last step involves carrying out an analysis, adjusting where you see fit and then improving. After developing a maintenance plan and having all the maintenance tasks done, you should analyze the results obtained for that period, adjust where you see fit and using the adjustments in improving the quality of your maintenance plan for the next year.
