Some Thoughts About Home Improvement & Maintenance
Some of the things we do in our homes are considered home improvement and other things are considered maintenance but it can be said that, in the end, doing maintenance will usually lead to home improvement. Let me give you an example of the relationship between home improvement & maintenance. I have a client with dogs and when they were puppies they decided that certain spots on the rugs were litter boxes. After much effort, and swearing, he got them to use the litter box but the damage to the rugs was done.
He tried maintenance like cleaning and things like that but in the end he wound up cutting huge chunks of his wife’s fairly new rugs up to get rid of the smell and stop the dogs from damaging more of the rugs. Luckily, his wife loves hardwood floors so now she has decided that since the dogs have ruined the rugs, and the attempts to clean the rugs have not been totally successful.
They hired a company to create hardwood floors. That is the relationship between home improvement & maintenance, sometimes continued maintenance on a problem area can lead to an act of home improvement that, in the end, was probably the best thing for that whole situation in the first place.
Jack’s back porch gutters
Another client, Jack, provides an example of the relationship between home improvement & maintenance is Jack’s back porch gutters. He has a roof, which of course has gutters on it, and then the deck is all in the back yard. He lives in the country so the snow and pine needles can accumulate in the gutters if not watched. He’s been maintaining the situation for a couple years by getting a telescoping device that allows him to get the snow off the roof so it cannot get into his house by melting.
But, it is obvious that this maintenance is temporary and home improvement by way of new eaves is necessary. But this is the dynamic between home improvement & maintenance, you do maintenance for as long as you can and then eventually home improvement is needed. It is just a matter of getting a good feel for that relationship between home improvement & maintenance and knowing when it is time to do home improvement. Kemp windows has handled many problems like this before.
Don’t Wait Too Long
Sometimes maintenance measures may seem like they are working but then you find out the hard way that they are not. If you have been patching your roof for some time you may think everything is fine but water could be getting in where you can’t see it and then that home improvement & maintenance dynamic needs to shift to home improvement before real damage, or more damage, is done. It is important to always know when it is time to stop maintaining and start improving.
Keep an eye on your house and do not dismiss any potential problem as small or petty. Sometimes it is the smallest problems that grow up to be the biggest headaches and that is something you need to understand in the balance between home improvement & maintenance.
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