Maintaining Your Home After Retirement

Maintaining your home after retirement can become a worry. There’s always something to do, whether that’s preparing the garden for winter, or clearing out the gutters as autumn arrives. This can be a lot – even when you have the energy to spend your evenings and weekends working on the house. When you’ve retired, you want to spend your time enjoying yourself, not pulling weeds from the drive, or climbing ladders. However, many retired people find themselves spending a huge amount of their newly acquired free time on home maintenance.

So, how can you save time and effort on maintaining your home after retirement? 

The Reality Of Maintaining Your Home After Retirement

The on-going cost of maintaining a home doesn’t change as you age, however your ability to carry out the maintenance often does. This can mean you become increasingly reliant on others, such as your family, which can lead to feelings of guilt and further worries. Some of the improvements you might need seem easy but can become a bigger problem, such as:

• Smoke detectors – Going up a ladder, even a step ladder is potentially dangerous. When your smoke alarm is going off, the last thing you need is to wobble atop a dangerous ladder to turn it off or change the battery. 
• Gutters –  Emptying leaves is essential to prevent overflowing that can cause flooding and water damage. 
• Gardens – Can become a challenge as knees and joints become less agile.
• Leaking pipes – Inspecting and protecting pipes can start to prove tricky, with really cold weather causing issues with pipes in attics and outbuildings, if they’re not properly insulated. 
• Broken roof tiles – Water ingress can quickly cause damage, and if the tile slips out of place and falls, they can cause damage to people and property below. 
• Overhanging trees – Low or overhanging branches can cause damage to roofs or windows in windy and stormy conditions. 

Inspecting Your Home For Maintenance Issues 

To treat all of these potential difficulties at once would be impossible. That’s why it’s important to do a thorough inspection of your property on a regular basis, in order to identify potential issues. First, check all potential indoor issues, particularly focusing on areas of potential leakage. Next, take as clear a visual inspection of your outdoor areas as you can, without risking your safety.  

Planning home maintenance after retirement: 

• Financial Planning – Perhaps most important of all, prepare for your home to need repairs. This requires setting aside money to pay for the repairs that you can’t avoid even when your income may have dropped. On average you should prepare to spend 1% of the value of your property each year on maintenance.
• Services and Maintenance – Sign up for regular services on your appliances, and you can often preserve them for longer and reduce the chance of breakdown. 
• Hiring Professionals – Get to know and build relationships with local tradespeople, so you know who to contact when, and if, something goes wrong, especially when the good trades are usually booked up well in advance.  
• Insurance and Guarantees – Ensure you have thorough insurance for your home. Check that your warrantees and guarantees have long lasting promises, and consider extending them. Also remember that if you start to travel more, and become away from home more often, or for longer periods, your insurance policy may need amending.

The Alternative To Maintaining A Large Family Home After Retirement

It is understandable that you don’t want to live in a house with incomplete maintenance tasks surrounding you. It is also reasonable to want to stay in the home where you have made so many memories. However, memories can travel, and maintenance worries need not.

When you live in an Adlington community, you don’t need to worry about major maintenance issues. We have an on-site team whose responsibility it is to keep things in-check – whether it’s going up a ladder to change a light bulb, keeping the beautiful gardens looking their best, or something  major like storm damage; our teams handle it all. 

Find out more about how living in an Adlington community can help make life easier.

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